Self-Locatingly Uncertain Psilocybin Trip Report by an Anonymous Reader

See more rational trip reports by anonymous readers for: 2C-B, 4-AcO-DMT, LSD, N,N-DMT, 5-MeO-DMT

Pre-ingestion Notes
Physiological Background

Restfulness: Well-Rested (7-8 hours of sleep)
Wake-up time: 5:10 am
Morning run: 5:30 am (~30 minutes total)
Breakfast time: 9:25 am
Food: 2 chicken sausages + ½ bagel, ¾ can of Peach-Pear La Croix (carbonation will create a slightly acidic environment, possibly potentiating drug’s metabolism)
Weight: 55-60 kg
Height: 170-180 cm
Sex / Identity / Orientation: Male / Cis / Hetero
Libido: decently high; 2 days since last masturbation
Dosage: 6 g, mostly caps; took 2x dosage of everyone else to prevent any potential short-term homeostatic adaptive effects which might lead to upping dosage mid-stride
Other Drugs: none

“I have a split personality”, said tom, being frank
Environmental Stimuli

Temperature: moderately warm – cozy (~ 74 F, 23 C)
Light: near window with ample filtered sunlight
Touch: sitting on fuzzy carpet; comfortable loose-fitting athleisure wear clothes
Olfactory: 5 sprays of peach-nectarine body scent (as an experiment to test memory retrieval of trip, as unlike other sensory systems, scent mostly bypasses the thalamic sensory gating filter)
Taste: regular mushroom taste, 2 Listerine strips immediately afterward (again to engage in potential memory retrieval). Nothing nauseating or stomach-troubling.
Auditory: listening to minimalist / contemporary classical music by Ludovico Einaudi
Visual: YouTube videos of fractal images & Islamic art
Social: 4 friends (3 of which are of the rationalist-tribe; all techies)
Plate of mushrooms and accompanying peach-nectarine body scent

Prior Cognitive State

Past drug experiences: 2 occasions of cannabis, few times alcohol, and 2 occasions of adderall. All minor experiences, none negative, and generally I strongly abstain from psychoactive drugs (even caffeine). No prior experience with psychedelics(!)
Mood: relatively optimistic and happy; no negative feelings
Beliefs: generally Fictionalist in ontology, though in recent years have experienced Platonist tendencies. Strongly grounded in an empirically-based, scientific-physicalist perspective. Strong sense of individuality + Selfhood. Not religious, nor spiritual, though upbringing was Roman Catholic.
Training: former academic neuroscience + pharmacologically-trained; current data science graduate student
Goals: to gain first-person experience of Klüver constants and re-establish/confirm any potential taxonomy of geometric forms (see here, here, and here for more)
Expectations: extremely skeptical that any fantastical effects might occur other than some random colors in the visual field, minor mood changes, minor memory + time effects such as retarded / slowed time, and maybe at most some Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome perceptual-type effects. Hoping for experiences of strong and consistent + clearly defined Klüver constants, but skeptical they even exist. Skeptical of any notion of god-minds, communion with nature, dying and being reborn, and generally any spiritual or mystical experiences.

Klüver constant

Real-Time Trip Report (unedited)
Time of Ingestion – 9:55 am, 02/15/2020
10:21 – First noticeable effect. Concentration lagging. Palms beginning to sweat. Starting to feel like it might be difficult to focus enough to write a report.
10:29 – REALLY strong physiological effect. Losing focus. Similar to being extremely tired(!). Sweat increasing (palms, pits, neck in that order). No visual or auditory hallucinations yet. Everyone else is laughing somewhat uncontrollably.
10:33 – First STRONG spike of losing concentration. Similar to being really tired or fainting.
10:36 – Another strong spike of losing consciousness. No hallucinations yet.
10:37 – Spike again. Increasing frequency now. One about every 15-20 seconds. Have to write this sentence in bursts, and memory is trying to keep up recovering my train of thought. Have to stop and now and then to
10:38 – First visual effectss! Tortoise shell-like fractal images. Hard to focus. Palms really really really sweaty, notice it as keyboard residue.
10:43 – Still hanging in there. Notice that friend’s response time is really late with around 2 minute delayss, not sure if that’s me or them? Extreme switching cost now between chrome tabs of writing and watching youtube vid.
10:46 – Switching cost too strong. Dilemma now between 3rd person documentation and 1st person immersion. Trying hrad.
10:47 – okay giving in to the experience now. too strong now
10:48 – laughter
10:48 does not make sense, really hard to type now, losing languge
50 trying hard to document. worried hwo to convey this
51 realizati not abot documnting 52 thats it 53 can i come back
54 latice structs 58 still here k
11
03

Post-Trip Report
Total Trip Duration: ~6-7 hours
I’m writing this now being fully recovered and in my usual frame of mind. I’m going to start with how much I can remember…
Somewhat cognizant but before peak experience, I came back from one of my blackouts and saw one of my friends outside the cabin. I worried about their safety but realized that other people were going to take care of him. I also remember one of my friends constantly checking up on me. The strongest thought that I recall during the beginning of my experience was realizing that I had to let go of all this documentation, stop worrying about others and what other people think, and had to let go of this 3rd person perspective. I know this sounds somewhat monstrously misanthropic, but at the time of the experience I felt like that to pursue Truth I had to go further than everyone else even if that meant leaving them behind, and it was distracting to even have to jump back and forth between 1st and 3rd person perspective to focus on responding to other people during my brief moments of sanity to tell them I was ok when I could be delving deeper and deeper into the experience. This thought of leaving all thoughts of others behind to pursue the Truth reoccurred a few times as I began to get sucked into the vortex of patterns found in the wood grains of the floor and the curls of the carpet.
Linearity of experience was soon lost. I blinked in and out of existence. Time was definitely not unraveling like the constant forward stream I was used to and I felt like I was teleporting from one false reality to the next. I didn’t know in what order those events occurred. At this period I really wasn’t thinking, but more just passively viewing brief glimpses and snapshots of my body going through the motion. One moment I was in the kitchen. The next locked in the bathroom. The next on the living room floor. It’s such a shame that there’s a quirk in our language requiring me to express these as “next experiences” when in reality I did not experience them as having an order. I felt a really strong sense of déjà vu and reverse déjà vu tied to each of them, as if I’ve already done them before while also simultaneously knowing that I will be doing them in the future. It was really weird to have the feeling that you know you’ve already lived the future.
I blinked onto the bathroom floor. I thought why should I even look back and respond at all to the other people asking if I was okay when I finally have the chance to explore and find Truth with a capital T, and suddenly a strong sadness hit me. It was more of a feeling than a coherent logical thought, but the best way I can explain it was that it was a type of guilt that I’ll never be able to share this with my sister, my brother, my mom and dad, and then what will happen to my roommates, and then all my other friends and classmates around me, and how they’ll worry about me and so I told myself I’ll have to come back for them.
And so I tried to come back. Trying and wanting is such an interesting concept. It’s weird to desire language without being able to form a coherent line of thought or internal sentence in your head, but that is what I remember doing. How do you say to yourself that you want something without even being able to describe to yourself what that is? It seems desire may be more fundamental than internal language. Soon my linguistic centers began to reboot and I realized that this had to do with my memory chunks getting larger and allowing me to hold more in short term memory. Although seemingly primitive and simplistic, I can’t emphasize enough how this realization that memory and language were intertwined and recursively bootstrapping each other really helped soothe away any panic that I was totally lost.
I blinked into the kitchen. Time was becoming more linearly coherent now, but I kept blanking out and teleporting randomly throughout the kitchen. The thing was: I didn’t think of it as the same kitchen. I thought of it as different parallel realities of a kitchen that I recognize. I remember my friend offering me a chip and me trying so very hard to grasp that chip from her and hold on to that reality even if it was not the true real one, as if by merely believing by sheer force of will that I am actually grasping an object then made it concrete. I recall saying ‘trying to parse’. I strained with cognitive effort to stop teleporting. I remember asking everyone in each reality I blinked into whether or not this was the real one. “Wow, is this real?” became a repeating question tinted with wonder and surprise.
I blinked into the living room. Time was linear again, and it seems I began to be able to somewhat coherently reflect on the geometric patterns clouding my sight. I regretfully wished I could have focused on them more (as well as the apparently living, pulsating, and breathing floor beneath me and the shrinking and growing of my hands), but it was at this moment that I truly to the deep core of myself had the gut feeling that this reality wasn’t my original one. I honestly and wholeheartedly believed that this reality was a construct and that I was living out a simulation either in the mind of my true body in the real world (where I was probably in some coma in the hospital) or inhabiting the body of a different version of myself in a parallel universe. Everything felt false. Fake. Simulated. I was overcome with a Great Sadness that I didn’t know how to get back to my own original reality, and that I never said goodbye to the people I loved. And I was surprised because these melancholic emotions were of such strength to overcome my scientific training and any previous skepticism I once held.
I tried in vain to remember some mathematical way of proving you were living in a simulation, maybe something from information theory, or Tegmark’s mathematical universe, or something regarding speeds and frames of references and computational power being limited in an embedded simulated universe, but I could not for the life of me recall how to actually prove this to myself or what experiment to run. I remember, fuck man, I really should have worked out those thought experiments and proofs in depth because now I’m stuck.
However, it was on that thought of frames of references that I realized with some sadness and regret that maybe it’s not all that bad since how can I be the one to say one reality is more real and valid than the next? The best way I can convey this was that it was a somewhat mono no aware-type feeling. Even if this is a simulation in my mind or I’m in some parallel universe, why should I be any less happy? If someone spent their whole life creating their own meaning through something as removed from reality as art, or music, or pure math, and was able to live a fulfilling life, why should any particular version of myself be considered less meaningful just because this version of me possesses a memory of another me as an origin and potential branching-off point? Wasn’t another reality just as valid as the original one that I just came from? What made my old frame of reference special except for the mere fact of it being my origin? Why was I feeling this sense of sadness that I left it all behind to teleport to this version of reality? And then came the acceptance that if this reality was just as real except for my gut belief that it wasn’t, why shouldn’t I be able to simultaneously accept that gut feeling and move on and live in this version of reality?
And so I decided to live on, and within a few hours began to lose this sense that this was the false reality (although I really really wished I had a GoPro camera with me so that I could definitively prove to myself that I was in the correct reality). I began to have a newfound strong sense of empathy towards people with dissociative disorders. Thinking back on the experience, I think I primed myself for these thoughts when I kept switching between first-person and third-person perspectives, telling myself I couldn’t handle the switching cost any longer and that I should just immerse myself fully in the experience and forget about documenting this for other people, and why was I even submitting myself to the approval of others anyways because if there’s anyone who will have to go further in their exploration and sacrifice the chance to be with others then I guess I’ll just have to take up that burden.
Overall, I think the strong dissociative experience of thinking this reality was the fake simulated one had to do with maybe a couple of things. As mentioned before, one cause could have been the psychological priming induced by constantly switching between 1st and 3rd person ways of perceiving this event, creating the necessary emotional conditions of being simultaneously split between existing and being fully immersed in the present moment versus wanting to abstract / detach myself from the moment.
The second potential cause of the dissociation could have been due to my brain constantly blacking out and being rebooted in another physical part of the house. Because I had no memory of the continuity of how I got from one context to the next, this conditioned my brain to rationalize and register each separate event as a separate reality, probably falsely recognizing and incorrectly pattern matching these experiences as being more similar to a dream state where teleportation is normal, perceptions are distorted, and sequences of events are jumbled. This probably then began synthesizing the necessary eventual gut-belief that this reality was fake (because I subconsciously falsely pattern matched that it was similar to a dream).
Finally, I think the third potential contributor to the dissociation occurred when I was coming down from the experience and my brain went on overdrive trying to rationalize events. It might be possible that the more you are adept at creatively rationalizing things away the paradoxically worse you are at accepting this reality. Just having knowledge of potential parallel realities in physics, the simulation hypothesis that we might either be simulated in our heads or on a computer and may not realize it, the philosophy of solipsism, and knowing the neuroscience of how just freaking good the brain is at tricking itself that something is real, all created fertile conditions for my brain to interpret this reality as false.
Thinking back on the experience, I now have a newfound appreciation for memory and the continuity of experience, and their contribution to what it means to feel situated and embodied in this reality. If I were to do this again I would probably micro-dose so that I could still retain my linguistic faculties and linear way of reasoning in order to investigate the visual geometric effects in much greater scientific 3rd person POV-like rigor, focusing less on the semantic psychoanalytical content of the experience and more on the psychophysical optical effects (which was my original goal!). This really showed me how dependent the sense of Self was on the continuity of memory and experience and that maybe the Self really is composed of different smaller frames of reference generated by subnetworks in the brain (and hence is an ecology of momentary and brief snapshots / selves constantly going in and out of existence, both competing and coalescing in dynamic flux to make up the whole Self). Without the strong pillar that the continuity of singular memory provides to the host body that this community of selves inhabits, I think there really could be a binding problem for integrating these individual snapshots into a singular Selfhood and individual identity that persist through time that we call ‘I’.
Overall, I gained a much greater appreciation for continuity, the linear narrative of language intertwined with memory, and what it feels like on the inside of someone who is dissociated and thinks their surrounding reality is just a construct and not real. Also, the geometric images were really cool and I finally now understand why people say Google’s DeepDream art seems psychedelic, because looking into the mirror during the later stages of my trip confirmed that my face really did look like a globular, eyes-everywhere, and skewed proportioned / sized image!
Anyways, I really want to thank my friends that were with me on this trip and for constantly checking up on me to make sure I was okay. Rarely do I feel comfortable in the presence of other people and I’m glad I felt safe with you.
Thank you
Overall, I’d give my first experience with psychedelics a 7/10!

2-Week Post-Trip Report
So it’s been 2 weeks since ingestion and I just wanted to briefly report this one last interesting phenomenon for documentation’s sake.
Out of the 14 days post-trip, a little less than half of those nights (6 nights in total, distributed more heavily in the week immediately after the trip), I’ve had dreams that featured strongly self-referential phenomena. Within these dreams, my perceptual surroundings immediately reminded me of my aforementioned psychonautical experience of questioning my reality. These strong emotional realizations would then essentially cause my brain to kick itself out of the dream.
However, instead of truly waking up, I was still nested inside another dream in which I was imagining waking up. I usually went through 2-3 rounds of this false waking-up cycle until I finally surfaced into the real reality of the morning.
I thought it interesting for the first 2 nights, but after that it actually got really tiring always waking up questioning whether or not I’m really awake, and then having to go through the same motions of prepping for school/work knowing you’ve done that 2-3 times already in your head for the day.
What was funny though was that this always occurred around the same time each morning (my body has always naturally woken up at 5 am on the dot since high school), and in each iteration of the dream in which I falsely woke up I remember looking at my clock and seeing that it is 5 am. This would then lend me false-confidence and confirm that “ah, ok, I’m not in the dream anymore since I really do wake up at 5 am“. However, I think after enough times of this not working my brain finally came to learn that that was no longer a reliable indicator of the reality being real.
This skeptical realization finally got strong enough to be able to recall within my dream and act as an early kick-out mechanism that I eventually woke up closer and closer to my true ‘waking up point’. I remember going through the wake-up, look at the clock, remember that this no longer works, then immediately get kicked out, and wake up again, look at the clock, then remember this no longer works and get kicked out again, wake up, then look at the clock and finally get some inkling that this perception is a little different and realize that’s because I’m really waking up for real now. A rather fascinating experience!

Featured image by Nick Swanson


Posthuman Art: Towards Full-Spectrum Positive Valence Amplification

Everyone says love hurts, but that is not true. Loneliness hurts. Rejection hurts. Losing someone hurts. Envy hurts. Everyone gets these things confused with love, but in reality love is the only thing in this world that covers up all pain and makes someone feel wonderful again. Love is the only thing in this world that does not hurt.

― Meša Selimović

Excerpt from the wonderful conversation between Lucas Perry, Sam Barker, and David Pearce posted on June 24 (2020) at the Future of Life Institute Podcast (where Mike Johnson and I have previously participated). [Emphasis mine].

Lucas Perry: For this first section, I’m basically interested in probing the releases that you already have done, Sam, and exploring them and your inspiration for the track titles and the soundscapes that you’ve produced. Some of the background and context for this is that much of this seems to be inspired by and related to David’s work, in particular the Hedonistic Imperative. I’m at first curious to know, Sam, how did you encounter David’s work, and what does it mean for you?
Sam Barker: David’s work was sort of arriving in the middle of a series of realizations, and kind of coming from a starting point of being quite disillusioned with music, and a little bit disenchanted with the vagueness, and the terminology, and the imprecision of the whole thing. I think part of me has always wanted to be some kind of scientist, but I’ve ended up at perhaps not the opposite end, but quite far away from it.
Lucas Perry: Could explain what you mean by vagueness and imprecision?
Sam Barker: I suppose the classical idea of what making music is about has a lot to do with the sort of western idea of individualism and about self-expression. I don’t know. There’s this romantic idea of artists having these frenzied creative bursts that give birth to the wonderful things, that it’s some kind of struggle. I just was feeling super disillusioned with all of that. Around that time, 2014 or 15, I was also reading a lot about social media, reading about behavioral science, trying to figure what was going on in this arena and how people are being pushed in different directions by this algorithmic system of information distribution. That kind of got me into this sort of behavioral science side of things, like the addictive part of the variable-ratio reward schedule with likes. It’s a free dopamine dispenser kind of thing. This was kind of getting me into reading about behavioral science and cognitive science. It was giving me a lot of clarity, but not much more sort of inspiration. It was basically like music.
Dance music especially is a sort of complex behavioral science. You do this and people do that. It’s all deeply ingrained. I sort of imagine the DJ as a sort Skinner box operator pulling puppet strings and making people behave in different ways. Music producers are kind of designing clever programs using punishment and reward, or suspense and release, and controlling people’s behavior. The whole thing felt super pushy and not a very inspiring conclusion. Looking at the problem from a cognitive science point of view is just the framework that helped me to understand what the problem was in the first place, so this kind of problem of being manipulative. Behavioral science is kind of saying what we can make people do. Cognitive psychology is sort of figuring out why people do that. That was my entry point into cognitive psychology, and that was kind of the basis for Debiasing.
There’s always been sort of a parallel for me between what I make and my state of mind. When I’m in a more positive state, I tend to make things I’m happier with, and so on. Getting to the bottom of what tricks were, I suppose, with dance music. I kind of understood implicitly, but I just wanted to figure out why things worked. I sort of came to the conclusion it was to do with a collection of biases we have, like the confirmation bias, and the illusion of truth effect, and the mere exposure effect. These things are like the guardians of four/four supremacy. Dance music can be pretty repetitive, and we describe it sometimes in really aggressive terminology. It’s a psychological kind of interaction.
Cognitive psychology was leading me to Kaplan’s law of the instrument. The law of the instrument says that if you give a small boy a hammer, he’ll find that everything he encounters requires pounding. I thought that was a good metaphor. The idea is that we get so used to using tools in a certain way that we lose sight of what it is we’re trying to do. We act in the way that the tool instructs us to do. I thought, what if you take away the hammer? That became a metaphor for me, in a sense, that David clarified in terms of pain reduction. We sort of put these painful elements into music in a way to give this kind of hedonic contrast, but we don’t really consider that that might not be necessary. What happens when we abolish these sort of negative elements? Are the results somehow released from this process? That was sort of the point, up until discovering the Hedonistic Imperative.
I think what I was needing at the time was a sort of framework, so I had the idea that music was decision making. To improve the results, you have to ask better questions, make better decisions. You can make some progress looking at the mechanics of that from a psychology point of view. What I was sort of lacking was a purpose to frame my decisions around. I sort of had the idea that music was a sort of a valence carrier, if you like, and that it could be tooled towards a sort of a greater purpose than just making people dance, which was for Debiasing the goal, really. It was to make people dance, but don’t use the sort of deeply ingrained cues that people used to, and see if that works.
What was interesting was how broadly it was accepted, this first EP. There were all kinds of DJs playing it in techno, ambient, electro, all sorts of different styles. It reached a lot of people. It was as if taking out the most functional element made it more functional and more broadly appealing. That was the entry point to utilitarianism. There was sort of an accidentally utilitarian act, in a way, to sort of try and maximize the pleasure and minimize the pain. I suppose after landing in utilitarianism and searching for some kind of a framework for a sense of purpose in my work, the Hedonistic Imperative was probably the most radical, optimistic take on the system. Firstly, it put me in a sort of mindset where it granted permission to explore sort of utopian ideals, because I think the idea of pleasure is a little bit frowned upon in the art world. I think the art world turns its nose up at such direct cause and effect. The idea that producers could be paradise engineers of sorts, or the precursors to paradise engineers, that we almost certainly would have a role in a kind of sensory utopia of the future.
There was this kind of permission granted. You can be optimistic. You can enter into your work with good intentions. It’s okay to see music as a tool to increase overall wellbeing, in a way. That was kind of the guiding idea for my work in the studio. I’m trying, these days, to put more things into the system to make decisions in a more conscious way, at least where it’s appropriate to. This sort of notion of reducing pain and increasing pleasure was the sort of question I would ask at any stage of decision making. Did this thing that I did serve those ends? If not, take a step back and try a different approach.
There’s something else to be said about the way you sort of explore this utopian world without really being bogged down. You handle the objections in such a confident way. I called it a zero gravity world of ideas. I wanted to bring that zero gravity feeling to my work, and to see that technology can solve any problem in this sphere. Anything’s possible. All the obstacles are just imagined, because we fabricate these worlds ourselves. These are things that were really instructive for me, as an artist.
Lucas Perry: That’s quite an interesting journey. From the lens of understanding cognitive psychology and human biases, was it that you were seeing those biases in dance music itself? If so, what were those biases in particular?
Sam Barker: On both sides, on the way it’s produced and in the way it’s received. There’s sort of an unspoken acceptance. You’re playing a set and you take a kick drum out. That signals to people to perhaps be alert. The lighting engineer, they’ll maybe raise the lights a little bit, and everybody knows that the music is going into sort of a breakdown, which is going to end in some sort of climax. Then, at that point, the kick drum comes back in. We all know this pattern. It’s really difficult to understand why that works without referring to things like cognitive psychology or behavioral science.
Lucas Perry: What does the act of debiasing the reception and production of music look like and do to the music and its reception?
Sam Barker: The first part that I could control was what I put into it. The experiment was whether a debiased piece of dance music could perform the same functionality, or whether it really relies on these deeply ingrained cues. Without wanting to sort of pat myself on the back, it kind of succeeded in its purpose. It was sort of proof that this was a worthy concept.
Lucas Perry: You used the phrase, earlier, four/four. For people who are not into dance music, that just means a kick on each beat, which is ubiquitous in much of house and techno music. You’ve removed that, for example, in your album Debiasing. What are other things that you changed from your end, in the production of Debiasing, to debias the music from normal dance music structure?
Sam Barker: It was informing the structure of what I was doing so much that I wasn’t so much on a grid where you have predictable things happening. It’s a very highly formulaic and structured thing, and that all keys into the expectation and this confirmation bias that people, I think, get some kind of kick from when the predictable happens. They say, yep. There you go. I knew that was going to happen. That’s a little dopamine rush, but I think it’s sort of a cheap trick. I guess I was trying to get the tricks out of it, in a way, so figuring out what they were, and trying to reduce or eliminate them was the process for Debiasing.
Lucas Perry: That’s quite interesting and meaningful, I think. Let’s just take trap music. I know exactly how trap music is going to go. It has this buildup and drop structure. It’s basically universal across all dance music. Progressive house in the 2010s was also exactly like this. What else? Dubstep, of course, same exact structure. Everything is totally predictable. I feel like I know exactly what’s going to happen, having listened to electronic music for over a decade.
Sam Barker: It works, I think. It’s a tried and tested formula, and it does the job, but when you’re trying to imagine states beyond just getting a little kick from knowing what was going to happen, that’s the place that I was trying to get to, really.
Lucas Perry: After the release of Debiasing in 2018, which was a successful attempt at serving this goal and mission, you then discovered the Hedonistic Imperative by David Pearce, and kind of leaned into consequentialism, it seems. Then, in 2019, you had two releases. You had BARKER 001 and you had Utility. Now, Utility is the album which most explicitly adopts David Pearce’s work, specifically in the Hedonistic Imperative. You mentioned electronic dance producers and artists in general can be sort of the first wave of, or can perhaps assist in paradise engineering, insofar as that will be possible in the near to short terms future, given advancements in technology. Is that sort of the explicit motivation and framing around those two releases of BARKER 001 and Utility?
Sam Barker: BARKER 001 was a few tracks that were taken out of the running for the album, because they didn’t sort of fit the concept. Really, I knew the last track was kind of alluding to the album. Otherwise, it was perhaps not sort of thematically linked. Hopefully, if people are interested in looking more into what’s behind the music, you can lead people into topics with the concept. With Utility, I didn’t want to just keep exploring cognitive biases and unpicking dance music structurally. It’s sort of a paradox, because I guess the Hedonistic Imperative argues that pleasure can exist without purpose, but I really was striving for some kind of purpose with the pleasure that I was getting from music. That sort of emerged from reading the Hedonistic Imperative, really, that you can apply music to this problem of raising the general level of happiness up a notch. I did sort of worry that by trying to please, it wouldn’t work, that it would be something that’s too sickly sweet. I mean, I’m pretty turned off by pop music, and there was this sort of risk that it would end up somewhere like that. That’s it, really. Just looking for a higher purpose with my work in music.
Lucas Perry: David, do you have any reactions?
David Pearce: Well, when I encountered Utility, yes, I was thrilled. As you know, essentially I’m a writer writing in quite heavy sub-academic prose. Sam’s work, I felt, helps give people a glimpse of our glorious future, paradise engineering. As you know, the reviews were extremely favorable. I’m not an expert critic or anything like that. I was just essentially happy and thrilled at the thought. It deserves to be mainstream. It’s really difficult, I think, to actually evoke the glorious future we are talking about. I mean, I can write prose, but in some sense music can evoke paradise better, at least for many people, than prose.
And it continues on. I highly recommend listening to the whole podcast: it is wonderfully edited and musical pieces referenced in the interview are brought up in real time for you to listen to. Barker also made a playlist of songs specifically for this podcast, which are played during the second half of the recording. It is delightful to listen to music that you know was produced with the explicit purpose of increasing your wellbeing. A wholesome message at last! Amazing art inspired by the ideology of Paradise Engineering, arriving near you… very soon.

As an aside, I think that shared visions of paradise are really essential for solving coordination problems. So…
Please join me in putting on Barker’s track Paradise Engineering, closing your eyes, and imagining- in detail- what the creation of an Institute for Paradise Engineering on a grand scale would look like. What would a positive Manhattan Project of Consciousness entail? What is the shortest path for us to create such a large-scale initiative?
By the way: the song is only 4 minutes long. So its duration is perfect for you to use as a guiding and grounding piece of media for a positive DMT trip. Press “play” immediately after you vaporize the DMT, sit back, relax, and try to render in your mind a posthuman paradise in which Full-Spectrum Supersentient Superintelligence has won and the threat of Pure Replicators has been averted. If you do this, please let me know what you experience as a result.

Ps. It’s worth noting that Barker’s conception of art is highly aligned with QRI’s view of what art could be like. See, in particular, models 4 through 8 in our article titled Harmonic Society.

Featured image by Michael Aaron Coleman


Saving Lives with Lemon-Lavender Flavor: THC-Free Nicotine-Laced Joints as a Substitute for Tobacco Cigarettes

Smoking takes an enormous toll on human health – accounting for about 6% of all ill-health globally according to the best estimates. This is more than HIV and malaria combined. Despite this, smoking is on the rise in many developing countries as people become richer and can afford to buy cigarettes.
– Smoking in the Developing World, an Effective Altruist cause profile by 8000 Hours
Tobacco is a mischievous plant. Tobacco smoke delivers an addictive substance in a particularly carcinogenic medium. Of course you can just get the addictive substance by vaping, presumably cutting the cost to your health by a substantial amount (assuming you don’t compensate for the relative safety of the medium with a significant increase in nicotine consumption). But many people find it hard to stop smoking, no doubt because the ritualistic aspect of it can become deeply ingrained, and perhaps also because of the mildly addictive properties of combustion products (speculatively, carbon monoxide itself has a psychoactive effect in small amounts).
So one idea to keep the nicotine and the smoking while reducing the negative effects is to lace nicotine into a plant with mild flavor and far less severe carcinogenic properties. Damiana, for example, used to be the plant delivery mechanism for research cannabinoids (cf. Spice), salvia, and other exotic drugs – the kind you find in a California smoke-shop or sketchy gas station. If damiana smoke has a better health profile than tobacco smoke when inhaled, then this could be of serious benefits to the world’s health (cf. Herbal Cigarettes).
Alas, can you really imagine millions of people switching from traditional, aromatic, well-known, “perfectly natural” tobacco cigarettes to weird, insipid, bland damiana cigarettes laced with nicotine? I can’t. I don’t think the product would make much of a dent in the market. At least not without some serious leverage and incentives, like tax exemptions or limited edition trading cards inside the packaging (for the younger crowd). But as those options are too unrealistic, we may need to come up with a different product altogether.

Perhaps we could add aromas as well? This multiplies the potential market several fold. Smokers who buy perfumes, enjoy aromatic spas, and/or make use of essential oils might be interested in “damiana cigarettes that smell like X”. From humulene and alpha-damascone to linalool and geraniol, a little goes a long way in producing a gentle, delicious, and seductive aroma. Indeed, we could even market this as being a kind of smokeable nootropic. Linalool, for instance, is not only essential in perfumery, but has also subtle (yet significant) psychoactive effects when inhaled or ingested orally (cf. lavender oil capsules). The possibilities are endless. For example, an evocative- if perhaps minimalistic- interpretation of a lavender-lemon flavor can be achieved by simply combining d-limonene, citral, and linalool. Or you could use complex accords made of dozens of terpenes. The smoothness of lavender with the awakening effects of lemon in a single power-punch of aromatic bliss, already superior in character to tobacco, could be trivially achieved with an open mind and some experimentation. And orange? Pineapple? Honeysuckle? Pear? Why not explore qualia-space while inhaling addictive smoke? At least you’ll do some productive work while feeding your vice (rather than just feeding your vice). And at a QALY discount over straight up tobacco smoke, this would seem to be by far the superior option, wouldn’t it?

Now, adding lots of terpenes and other aromachemicals to a “neutral” substrate for a smokeable material reminds of something… It’s almost as if this has been explored before by someone, somewhere…
Of course!

The difference between Orange Kush and Silver Haze is not only their THC content (which is 14-18% and 18-23%, respectively, if you must know) or the degree to which CBD is present. To a large extent, their distinct aromas, feel, and perhaps even subjective effects are explained in terms of the presence of terpenoids and other aromatic compounds. For instance, Orange Kush has more terpinolene while Silver Haze has more myrcene. Of course there is very little knowledge about how exactly these differences cash out in psychoactivity. But nonetheless, the cannabis world finds them to be utterly fascinating and endlessly worthy of discussion.
So, could we perhaps take this plant, which has been praised for its aromatic properties, which already has thousands of well-defined and optimized strains, and which is in the process of becoming legal(ish) worldwide… and use it as a delivery medium for nicotine?
Why not? Although cannabis smoke is by no means harmless, it might be substantially better for your health than tobacco smoke. If people find the experience of smoking THC-free nicotine-laced Orange Kush joints enjoyable, and this enjoyment is strong enough to be superior to the experience of smoking tobacco, we may be able to reduce the health costs of nicotine worldwide by a huge margin. Could this be the long-awaited Cause X?


QRI’s FAQ

These are the answers to the most Frequently Asked Questions about the Qualia Research Institute. (See also: the glossary).

(Organizational) Questions About the Qualia Research Institute

What type of organization is QRI?

QRI is a nonprofit research group studying consciousness based in San Francisco, California. We are a registered 501(c)(3) organization.

What is the relationship between QRI, Qualia Computing, and Opentheory?

Qualia Computing and Opentheory are the personal blogs of QRI co-founders Andrés Gómez Emilsson and Michael Johnson, respectively. While QRI was in its early stages, all original QRI research was initially published on these two platforms. However, from August 2020 onward, this is shifting to a unified pipeline centered on QRI’s website.

Is QRI affiliated with an academic institution or university?

Although QRI does collaborate regularly with university researchers and laboratories, we are an independent research organization. Put simply, QRI is independent because we didn’t believe we could build the organization we wanted and needed to build within the very real constraints of academia. These constraints include institutional pressure to work on conventional projects, to optimize for publication metrics, and to clear various byzantine bureaucratic hurdles. It also includes professional and social pressure to maintain continuity with old research paradigms, to do research within an academic silo, and to pretend to be personally ignorant of altered states of consciousness. It’s not that good research cannot happen under these conditions, but we believe good consciousness research happens despite the conditions in academia, not because of them, and the best use of resources is to build something better outside of them.

How does QRI align with the values of EA?

Effective Altruism (EA) is a movement that uses evidence and reason to figure out how to do the most good. QRI believes this aesthetic is necessary and important for creating a good future. We also believe that if we want to do the most good, foundational research on the nature of the good is of critical importance. Two frames we offer are Qualia Formalism and Sentientism. Qualia Formalism is the claim that experience has a precise mathematical description, that a formal account of experience should be the goal of consciousness research. Sentientism is the claim that value and disvalue are entirely expressed in the nature and quality of conscious experiences. We believe EA is enriched by both Qualia Formalism and Sentientism.

What would QRI do with $10 billion?

Currently, QRI is a geographically distributed organization with access to commercial-grade neuroimaging equipment. The first thing we’d do with $10 billion is set up a physical headquarters for QRI and buy professional-grade neuroimaging devices (fMRI, MEG, PET, etc.) and neurostimulation equipment. We’d also hire teams of full-time physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, computer scientists, neuroscientists, chemists, philosophers, and artists. We’ve accomplished a great deal on a shoestring budget, but it would be hard to overestimate how significant being able to build deep technical teams and related infrastructure around core research threads would be for us (and, we believe, for the growing field of consciousness research). Scaling is always a process and we estimate our ‘room for funding’ over the next year is roughly ~$10 million. However, if we had sufficiently deep long-term commitments, we believe we could successfully scale both our organization and research paradigm into a first-principles approach for decisively diagnosing and curing most forms of mental illness. We would continue to run studies and experiments, collect interesting data about exotic and altered states of consciousness, pioneer new technologies that help eliminate involuntary suffering, and develop novel ways to enable conscious beings to safely explore the state-space of consciousness.

Questions About Our Research Approach

What differentiates QRI from other research groups studying consciousness?

The first major difference is that QRI breaks down “solving consciousness” into discrete subtasks; we’re clear about what we’re trying to do, which ontologies are relevant for this task, and what a proper solution will look like. This may sound like a small thing, but an enormous amount of energy is wasted in philosophy by not being clear about these things. This lets us “actually get to work.”

Second, our focus on valence is rare in the field of consciousness studies. A core bottleneck in understanding consciousness is determining what its ‘natural kinds’ are: terms which carve reality at the joints. We believe emotional valence (the pleasantness/unpleasantness of an experience) is one such natural kind, and this gives us a huge amount of information about phenomenology. It also offers a clean bridge for interfacing with (and improving upon) the best neuroscience.

Third, QRI takes exotic states of consciousness extremely seriously whereas most research groups do not. An analogy we make here is that ignoring exotic states of consciousness is similar to people before the scientific enlightenment thinking that they can understand the nature of energy, matter, and the physical world just by studying it at room temperature while completely ignoring extreme states such as what’s happening in the sun, black holes, plasma, or superfluid helium. QRI considers exotic states of consciousness as extremely important datapoints for reverse-engineering the underlying formalism for consciousness.

Lastly, we have a focus on precise, empirically testable predictions, which is rare in philosophy of mind. Any good theory of consciousness should also contribute to advancements in neuroscience. Likewise, any good theory of neuroscience should contribute to novel, bold, falsifiable predictions, and blueprints for useful things, such as new forms of therapy. Having such a full-stack approach to consciousness which does each of those two things is thus an important marker that “something interesting is going on here” and is simply very useful for testing and improving theory.

What methodologies are you using? How do you actually do research?

QRI has three core areas of research: philosophy, neuroscience, and neurotechnology

Philosophy: Our philosophy research is grounded in the eight problems of consciousness. This divide-and-conquer approach lets us explore each subproblem independently, while being confident that when all piecemeal solutions are added back together, they will constitute a full solution to consciousness.

Neuroscience: We’ve done original synthesis work on combining several cutting-edge theories of neuroscience (the free energy principle, the entropic brain, and connectome-specific harmonic waves) into a unified theory of Bayesian emotional updating; we’ve also built the world’s first first-principles method for quantifying emotional valence from fMRI. More generally, we focus on collecting high valence neuroimaging datasets and developing algorithms to analyze, quantify, and visualize them. We also do extensive psychophysics research, focusing on both the fine-grained cognitive-emotional effects of altered states, and how different types of sounds, pictures, body vibrations, and forms of stimulation correspond with low and high valence states of consciousness.

Neurotechnology: We engage in both experimentation-driven exploration, tracking the phenomenological effects of various interventions, as well as theory-driven development. In particular, we’re prototyping a line of neurofeedback tools to help treat mental health disorders.

What has QRI accomplished?

The most direct way to see what QRI has accomplished is to read through our core research. Some of our noteworthy accomplishments include: creating a clear conceptual framework for researching consciousness, conducting original research on cluster headache frequency and treatment options, constructing a novel neuroscience paradigm for meditation & jhana states, offering an in-depth defense for formalism and against functionalism, outlining solutions for scaling cluster headache treatment options, presenting evidence that the pain-pleasure scale is logarithmic, providing a fully mathematical account of the geometry of DMT experiences, offering a detailed enumeration of research threads enabled by a harmonic decomposition of brain activity, exploring anti-tolerance drugs, proposing body-cooling technology to reduce MDMA neurotoxicity, inventing a technique for psychedelic cryptography, finding a theoretical solution to the problem of other minds, creating a novel method to calculate emotional valence from neuroimaging data, and developing a unified theory of brain dynamics and emotional updating.

What does QRI hope to do over the next 5 years? Next 20 years?

Over the next five years, we intend to further our neurotechnology to the point that we can treat PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), especially treatment-resistant PTSD. We intend to empirically verify or falsify the symmetry theory of valence. If it is falsified, we will search for a new theory that ties together all of the empirical evidence we have discovered. We aim to create an Effective Altruist cause area regarding the reduction of intense suffering as well as the study of very high valence states of consciousness.

Over the next 20 years, we intend to become a world-class research center where we can put the discipline of “paradise engineering” (as described by philosopher David Pearce) on firm academic grounds.

Questions About Our Mission

How can understanding the science of consciousness make the world a better place?

Understanding consciousness would improve the world in a tremendous number of ways. One obvious outcome would be the ability to better predict what types of beings are conscious—from locked-in patients to animals to pre-linguistic humans—and what their experiences might be like.

We also think it’s useful to break down the benefits of understanding consciousness in three ways: reducing the amount of extreme suffering in the world, increasing the baseline well-being of conscious beings, and achieving new heights for what conscious states are possible to experience.

Without a good theory of valence, many neurological disorders will remain completely intractable. Disorders such as fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), migraines, and cluster headaches are all currently medical puzzles and yet have incredibly negative effects on people’s livelihoods. We think that a mathematical theory of valence will explain why these things feel so bad and what the shortest path for getting rid of them looks like. Besides valence-related disorders, nearly all mental health disorders, from clinical depression and PTSD to schizophrenia and anxiety disorders, will become better understood as we discover the structure of conscious experience.

We also believe that many (though not all) of the zero-sum games people play are the products of inner states of dissatisfaction and suffering. Broadly speaking, people who have a surplus of cognitive and emotional energy tend to play more positive sum games, are more interested in cooperation, and are very motivated to do so. We think that studying states such as those induced by MDMA that combine both high valence and a prosocial behavior mindset can radically alter the game theoretical landscape of the world for the better.

What is the end goal of QRI? What does QRI’s perfect world look like?

In QRI’s perfect future:

There is no involuntary suffering and all sentient beings are animated by gradients of bliss,

Research on qualia and consciousness is done at a very large scale for the purpose of mapping out the state-space of consciousness and understanding its computational and intrinsic properties (we think that we’ve barely scratched the surface of knowledge about consciousness),

We have figured out the game-theoretical subtleties in order to make that world dynamic yet stable: radically positive, without just making it fully homogeneous and stuck in a local maxima.

Questions About Getting Involved

What are the most important things to read to learn about QRI’s research?

We are almost finished with an Intro to QRI book, but until that is ready, you can start by reading the QRI Glossary to become acquainted with the vocabulary we use. From there, you can explore our core research and our research lineages. Lastly, you can also check out this Intro to QRI Reading List, the Best of Opentheory, or the Top 10 Qualia Computing Articles.

How can I follow QRI’s work?

You can start by signing up for our newsletter! This is by far our most important communication channel. We also have a Facebook page, Twitter account, and Linkedin page. Lastly, we share some exclusive tidbits of ideas and thoughts with our supporters on Patreon.

How can I get involved with QRI?

The best ways to help QRI are to:

Donate to help support our work.

Read and engage with our research. We love critical responses to our ideas and encourage you to reach out if you have an interesting thought!

Spread the word to friends, potential donors, and people that you think would make great collaborators with QRI.

Check out our volunteer page to find more detailed ways that you can contribute to our mission, from independent research projects to QRI content creation.

Questions About Consciousness

What assumptions about consciousness does QRI have? What theory of consciousness does QRI support?

The most important assumption that QRI is committed to is Qualia Formalism, the hypothesis that the internal structure of our subjective experience can be represented precisely by mathematics. We are also Valence Realists: we believe valence (how good or bad an experience feels) is a real and well-defined property of conscious states. Besides these positions, we are fairly agnostic and everything else is an educated guess useful for pragmatic purposes.

What does QRI think of functionalism?

QRI thinks that functionalism takes many high-quality insights about how systems work and combines them in such a way that both creates confusion and denies the possibility of progress. In its raw, unvarnished form, functionalism is simply skepticism about the possibility of Qualia Formalism. It is simply a statement that “there is nothing here to be formalized; consciousness is like élan vital, confusion to be explained away.” It’s not actually a theory of consciousness; it’s an anti-theory. This is problematic in at least two ways:

1. By assuming consciousness has formal structure, we’re able to make novel predictions that functionalism cannot (see e.g. QRI’s Symmetry Theory of Valence, and Quantifying Bliss). A few hundred years ago, there were many people who doubted that electromagnetism had a unified, elegant, formal structure, and this was a reasonable position at the time. However, in the age of the iPhone, skepticism that electricity is a “real thing” that can be formalized is no longer reasonable. Likewise, everything interesting and useful QRI builds using the foundation of Qualia Formalism stretches functionalism’s credibility thinner and thinner.

2. Insofar as functionalism is skeptical about the formal existence of consciousness, it’s skeptical about the formal existence of suffering and all sentience-based morality. In other words, functionalism is a deeply amoral theory, which if taken seriously dissolves all sentience-based ethical claims. This is due to there being an infinite number of functional interpretations of a system: there’s no ground-truth fact of the matter about what algorithm a physical system is performing, about what information-processing it’s doing. And if there’s no ground-truth about which computations or functions are present, but consciousness arises from these computations or functions, then there’s no ground-truth about consciousness, or things associated with consciousness, like suffering. This is a strange and subtle point, but it’s very important. This point alone is not sufficient to reject functionalism: if the universe is amoral, we shouldn’t hold a false theory of consciousness in order to try to force reality into some ethical framework. But in debates about consciousness, functionalists should be up-front that functionalism and radical moral anti-realism is a package deal, that inherent in functionalism is the counter-intuitive claim that just as we can reinterpret which functions a physical system is instantiating, we can reinterpret what qualia it’s experiencing and whether it’s suffering.

For an extended argument, see Against Functionalism.

What does QRI think of panpsychism?

At QRI, we hold a position that is close to dual-aspect monism or neutral monism, which states that the universe is composed of one kind of thing that is neutral, and that both the mental and physical are two features of this same substance. One of the motivating factors for holding this view is that if there is deep structure in the physical, then there should be a corresponding deep structure to phenomenal experience. And we can tie this together with physicalism in the sense that the laws of physics ultimately describe fields of qualia. While there are some minor disagreements between dual-aspect monism and panpsychism, we believe that our position mostly fits well with a panpsychist view—that phenomenal properties are a fundamental feature of the world and aren’t spontaneously created only when a certain computation is being performed.

However, even with this view, there still are very important questions, such as: what makes a unified conscious experience? Where does one experience end and another begin? Without considering these problems in the light of Qualia Formalism, it is easy to tie animism into panpsychism and believe that inanimate objects like rocks, sculptures, and pieces of wood have spirits or complex subjective experiences. At QRI, we disagree with this and think that these types of objects might have extremely small pockets of unified conscious experience, but will mostly be masses of micro-qualia that are not phenomenally bound into some larger experience.

What does QRI think of IIT (Integrated Information Theory)?

QRI is very grateful for IIT because it is the first mainstream theory of consciousness that satisfies a Qualia Formalist account of experience. IIT says (and introduced the idea!) that for every conscious experience, there is a corresponding mathematical object such that the mathematical features of that object are isomorphic to the properties of the experience. QRI believes that without this idea, we cannot solve consciousness in a meaningful way, and we consider the work of Giulio Tononi to be one of our core research lineages. That said, we are not in complete agreement with the specific mathematical and ontological choices of IIT, and we think it may be trying to ‘have its cake and eat it too’ with regard to functionalism vs physicalism. For more, see Sections III-V of Principia Qualia.

We make no claim that some future version of IIT, particularly something more directly compatible with physics, couldn’t cleanly address our objections, and see a lot of plausible directions and promise in this space.

What does QRI think of the free energy principle and predictive coding?

On our research lineages page, we list the work of Karl Friston as one of QRI’s core research lineages. We consider the free energy principle (FEP), as well as related research such as predictive coding, active inference, the Bayesian brain, and cybernetic regulation, as an incredibly elegant and predictive story of how brains work. Friston’s idea also forms a key part of the foundation for QRI’s theory of brain self-organization and emotional updating, Neural Annealing.

However, we don’t think that the free energy principle is itself a theory of consciousness, as it suffers from many of the shortcomings of functionalism: we can tell the story about how the brain minimizes free energy, but we don’t have a way of pointing at the brain and saying *there* is the free energy! The FEP is an amazing logical model, but it’s not directly connected to any physical mechanism. It is a story that “this sort of abstract thing is going on in the brain” without a clear method of mapping this abstract story to reality.

Friston has supported this functionalist interpretation of his work, noting that he sees consciousness as a process of inference, not a thing. That said, we are very interested in his work on calculating the information geometry of Markov blankets, as this could provide a tacit foundation for a formalist account of qualia under the FEP. Regardless of this, though, we believe Friston’s work will play a significant role in a future science of mind.

What does QRI think of global workspace theory?

The global workspace theory (GWT) is a cluster of empirical observations that seem to be very important for understanding what systems in the brain contribute to a reportable experience at a given point in time. The global workspace theory is a very important clue for answering questions of what philosophers call Access Consciousness, or the aspects of our experience on which we can report.

However, QRI does not consider the global workspace theory to be a full theory of consciousness. Parts of the brain that are not immediately contributing to the global workspace may be composed of micro qualia, or tiny clusters of experience. They’re obviously impossible to report on, but they are still relevant to the study of consciousness. In other words, just because a part of your brain wasn’t included in the instantaneous global workspace, doesn’t mean that it can’t suffer or it can’t experience happiness. We value global workspace research because questions of Access Consciousness are still very critical for a full theory of consciousness.

What does QRI think of higher-order theories of consciousness?

QRI is generally opposed to theories of consciousness that equate consciousness with higher order reflective thought and cognition. Some of the most intense conscious experiences are pre-reflective or unreflective such as blind panic, religious ecstasy, experiences of 5-MeO-DMT, and cluster headaches. In these examples, there is not much reflectivity nor cognition going on, yet they are intensely conscious. Therefore, we largely reject any attempt to define consciousness with a higher-order theory.

What is the relationship between evolution and consciousness?

The relationship between evolution and consciousness is very intricate and subtle. An eliminativist approach arrives at the simple idea that information processing of a certain type is evolutionarily advantageous, and perhaps we can call this consciousness. However, with a Qualia Formalist approach, it seems instead that the very properties of the mathematical object isomorphic to consciousness can play key roles (either causal or in terms of information processing) that make it advantageous for organisms to recruit consciousness.

If you don’t realize that consciousness maps onto a mathematical object with properties, you may think that you understand why consciousness was recruited by natural selection, but your understanding of the topic would be incomplete. In other words, to have a full understanding of why evolution recruited consciousness, you need to understand what advantages the mathematical object has. One very important feature of consciousness is its capacity for binding. For example, the unitary nature of experience—the fact that we can experience a lot of qualia simultaneously—may be a key feature of consciousness that accelerates the process of finding solutions to constraint satisfaction problems. In turn, evolution would hence have a reason to recruit states of consciousness for computation. So rather than thinking of consciousness as identical with the computation that is going on in the brain, we can think of it as a resource with unique computational benefits that are powerful and dynamic enough to make organisms that use it more adaptable to their environments.

Does QRI think that animals are conscious?

QRI thinks there is a very high probability that every animal with a nervous system is conscious. We are agnostic about unified consciousness in insects, but we consider it very likely. We believe research on animal consciousness has relevance when it comes to treating animals ethically. Additionally, we do think that the ethical importance of consciousness has more to do with the pleasure-pain axis (valence), rather than cognitive ability. In that sense, the suffering of non-human animals may be just as morally relevant, if not more relevant than humans. The cortex seems to play a largely inhibitory role for emotions, such that the larger the cortex is, the better we’re able to manage and suppress our emotions. Consequently, animals whose cortices are less developed than ours may experience pleasure and pain in a more intense and uncontrollable way, like a pre-linguistic toddler.

Does QRI think that plants are conscious?

We think it’s very unlikely that plants are conscious. The main reason is that they lack an evolutionary reason to recruit consciousness. Large-scale phenomenally bound experience may be very energetically expensive, and plants don’t have much energy to spare. Additionally, plants have thick cellulose walls that separate individual cells, making it very unlikely that plants can solve the binding problem and therefore create unified moments of experience.

Why do some people seek out pain?

This is a very multifaceted question. As a whole, we postulate that in the vast majority of cases, when somebody may be nominally pursuing pain or suffering, they’re actually trying to reduce internal dissonance in pursuit of consonance or they’re failing to predict how pain will actually feel. For example, when a person hears very harsh music, or enjoys extremely spicy food, this can be explained in terms of either masking other unpleasant sensations or raising the energy parameter of experience, the latter of which can lead to neural annealing: a very pleasant experience that manifests as consonance in the moment.

I sometimes like being sad. Is QRI trying to take that away from me?

Before we try to ‘fix’ something, it’s important to understand what it’s trying to do for us. Sometimes suffering leads to growth; sometimes creating valuable things involves suffering. Sometimes, ‘being sad’ feels strangely good. Insofar as suffering is doing good things for us, or for the world, QRI advocates a light touch (see Chesterton’s fence). However, we also suggest two things:

1. Most kinds of melancholic or mixed states of sadness usually are pursued for reasons that cash out as some sort of pleasure. Bittersweet experiences are far more preferable than intense agony or deep depression. If you enjoy sadness, it’s probably because there’s an aspect of your experience that is enjoyable. If it were possible to remove the sad part of your experience while maintaining the enjoyable part of it, you might be surprised to find that you prefer this modified experience more than the original one.

2. There are kinds of sadness and suffering that are just bad, that degrade us as humans, and would be better to never feel. QRI doesn’t believe in forcibly taking away voluntary suffering, or pushing bliss on people. But we would like to live in a world where people can choose to avoid such negative states, and on the margin, we believe it would be better for humanity for more people to be joyful, filled with a deep sense of well-being.

If dissonance is so negative, why is dissonance so important in music?

When you listen to very consonant music or consonant tones, you will quickly adapt to these sounds and get bored of them. This has nothing to do with consonance itself being unpleasant and everything to do with learning in the brain. Whenever you experience the same stimuli repeatedly, most brains will trigger a boredom mechanism and add dissonance of its own in order to make you enjoy the stimuli less or simply inhibit it, not allowing you to experience it at all. Semantic satiation is a classic example of this where repeating the same word over and over will make it lose its meaning. For this reason, to trigger many high valence states of consciousness consecutively, you need contrast. In particular, music works with gradients of consonance and dissonance, and in most cases, moving towards consonance is what feels good rather than the absolute value of consonance. Music tends to feel the best when you mix a high absolute value of consonance together with a very strong sense of moving towards an even higher absolute value of consonance. Playing some levels of dissonance during a song will later enhance the enjoyment of the more consonant parts such as the chorus of songs, which are reported to be the most euphoric parts of song and typically are extremely consonant.

What is QRI’s perspective on AI and AI safety research?

QRI thinks that consciousness research is critical for addressing AI safety. Without a precise way of quantifying an action’s impact on conscious experiences, we won’t be able to guarantee that an AI system has been programmed to act benevolently. Also, certain types of physical systems that perform computational tasks may be experiencing negative valence without any outside observer being aware of it. We need a theory of what produces unpleasant experiences to avoid inadvertently creating superintelligences that suffer intensely in the process of solving important problems or accidentally inflict large-scale suffering.

Additionally, we think that a very large percentage of what will make powerful AI dangerous is that the humans programming these machines and using these machines may be reasoning from states of loneliness, resentment, envy, or anger. By discovering ways to help humans transition away from these states, we can reduce the risks of AI by creating humans that are more ethical and aligned with consciousness more broadly. In short: an antidote for nihilism could lead to a substantial reduction in existential risk.

One way to think about QRI and AI safety is that the world is building AI, but doesn’t really have a clear, positive vision of what to do with AI. Lacking this, the default objective becomes “take over the world.” We think a good theory of consciousness could and will offer new visions of what kind of futures are worth building—new Schelling points that humanity (and AI researchers) could self-organize around.

Can digital computers implementing AI algorithms be conscious?

QRI is agnostic about this question. We have reasons to believe that digital computers in their current form cannot solve the phenomenal binding problem. Most of the activity in digital computers can be explained in a stepwise fashion in terms of localized processing of bits of information. Because of this, we believe that current digital computers could be creating fragments of qualia, but are unlikely to be creating strongly globally bound experiences. So, we consider the consciousness of digital computers unlikely, although given our current uncertainty over the Binding Problem (or alternatively framed, the Boundary Problem), this assumption is lightly held. In the previous question, when we write that “certain types of physical systems that perform computational tasks may be experiencing negative valence”, we assume that these hypothetical computers have some type of unified conscious experience as a result of having solved the phenomenal binding problem. For more on this topic, see: “What’s Out There?“

How much mainstream recognition has QRI’s work received, either for this line of research or others? Has it published in peer-reviewed journals, received any grants, or garnered positive reviews from other academics?

We are collaborating with researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University on several studies involving the analysis of neuroimaging data of high-valence states of consciousness. Additionally, we are currently preparing two publications for peer-reviewed journals on topics from our core research areas. Michael Johnson will be presenting at this year’s MCS seminar series, along with Karl Friston, Anil Seth, Selen Atasoy, Nao Tsuchiya, and others; Michael Johnson, Andrés Gómez Emilsson, and Quintin Frerichs have also given invited talks at various east-coast colleges (Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and Dartmouth).

Some well-known researchers and intellectuals that are familiar and think positively about our work include: Robin Carhart-Harris, Scott Alexander, David Pearce, Steven Lehar, Daniel Ingram, and more. Scott Alexander acknowledged that QRI put together the paradigms that contributed to Friston’s integrative model of how psychedelics work before his research was published. Our track record so far has been to foreshadow (by several years in advance) key discoveries later proposed and accepted in mainstream academia. Given our current research findings, we expect this trend to continue in the years to come.

Miscellaneous

How does QRI know what is best for other people/animals? What about cultural relativism?

We think that, to a large extent, people and animals work under the illusion that they are pursuing intentional objects, states of the external environment, or relationships that they may have with the external environment. However, when you examine these situations closely, you realize that what we actually pursue are states of high valence triggered by external circumstances. There may be evolutionary and cultural selection pressures that push us toward self-deception as to how we actually function. And we consider it negative to have these selection pressures makes us less self-aware because it often focuses our energy on unpleasant, destructive, or fruitless strategies. QRI hopes to support people in fostering more self-awareness, which can come through experiments with one’s own consciousness, like meditation, as well as through the deeper theoretical understanding of what it is that we actually want.

How central is David Pearce’s work to the work of the QRI?

We consider David Pearce to be one of our core lineages. We particularly value his contribution to valence realism, the insistence that states of consciousness come with an overall valence, and that this is very morally relevant. We also consider David Pearce to be very influential in philosophy of mind; Pearce, for instance, coined the phrase ‘tyranny of the intentional object’, the title of a core QRI piece of the same name. We have been inspired by Pearce’s descriptions for what any scientific theory of consciousness should be able to explain, as well as his particular emphasis on the binding problem. David’s vision of a world animated by ‘gradients of bliss’ has also been very generative as a normative thought experiment which integrates human and non-human well-being. We do not necessarily agree with all of David Pearce’s work, but we respect him as an insightful and vivid thinker who has been brave enough to actually take a swing at describing utopia and who we believe is far ahead of his time.

What does QRI think of negative utilitarianism?

There’s general agreement within QRI that intense suffering is an extreme moral priority, and we’ve done substantial work on finding simple ways of getting rid of extreme suffering (with our research inspiring at least one unaffiliated startup to date). However, we find it premature to strongly endorse any pre-packaged ethical theory, especially because none of them are based on any formalism, but rather an ungrounded concept of ‘utility’. The value of information here seems enormous, and we hope that we can get to a point where the ‘correct’ ethical theory may simply ‘pop out of the equations’ of reality. It’s also important to highlight the fact that common versions and academic formulations of utilitarianism seem to be blind to many subtleties concerning valence. For example, they do not distinguish between mixed states of consciousness where you have extreme pleasure combined with extreme suffering in such a way that you judge the experience to be neither entirely suffering nor entirely happiness and states of complete neutrality, such as extreme white noise. Because most formulations of utilitarianism do not distinguish between them, we are generally suspicious of the idea that philosophers of ethics have considered all of the relevant attributes of consciousness in order to make accurate judgments about morality.

What does QRI think of philosophy of mind departments?

We believe that the problems that philosophy of mind departments address tend to be very disconnected from what truly matters from an ethical, moral, and philosophical point of view. For example, there is little appreciation of the value of bringing mathematical formalisms into discussions about the mind, or what that might look like in practice. Likewise there is close to no interest in preventing extreme suffering nor understanding its nature. Additionally, there is usually a disregard for extreme states of positive valence, and strange or exotic experiences in general. It may be the case that there are worthwhile things happening in departments and classes creating and studying this literature, but we find them characterized by processes which are unlikely to produce progress on their nominal purpose, creating a science of mind.

In particular, in academic philosophy of mind, we’ve seen very little regard for producing empirically testable predictions. There are millions of pages written about philosophy of mind, but the number of pages that provide precise, empirically testable predictions is quite thin.

What therapies does QRI recommend for depression, anxiety, and chronic pain?

At QRI, we do not make specific recommendations to individuals, but rather point to areas of research that we consider to be extremely important, tractable, and neglected, such as anti-tolerance drugs, neural annealing techniques, frequency specific microcurrent for kidney stone pain, and N,N-DMT and other tryptamines for cluster headaches and migraines.

Why does QRI think it’s so important to focus on ending extreme suffering?

QRI thinks ending extreme suffering is important, tractable, and neglected. It’s important because of the logarithmic scales of pleasure and pain—the fact that extreme suffering is far worse by orders of magnitude than what people intuitively believe. It’s tractable because there are many types of extreme suffering that have existing solutions that are fairly trivial or at least have a viable path for being solved with moderately funded research programs. And it’s neglected mostly because people are unaware of the existence of these states, though not necessarily because of their rarity. For example, 10% of the population experiences kidney stones at some point in their life, but for reasons having to do with trauma, PTSD, and the state-dependence of memory, even people who have suffered from kidney stones do not typically end up dedicating their time or resources toward eradicating them.

It’s also likely that if we can meaningfully improve the absolute worst experiences, much of the knowledge we’ll gain in that process will translate into other contexts. In particular, we should expect to figure out how to make moderately depressed people happier, fix more mild forms of pain, improve the human hedonic baseline, and safely reach extremely great peak states. Mood research is not a zero-sum game. It’s a web of synergies.

Many thanks to Andrew Zuckerman, Mackenzie Dion, and Mike Johnson for their collaboration in putting this together. Featured image is QRI’s logo – animated by Hunter Meyer.

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