Peaceful Qualia: The Manhattan Project of Consciousness

Introduction
This short story is intended to provide an intuition pump, rather than a formal argument. The intuitions unleashed may help some people to conceive of a world in which consciousness research enabled the creation of a world-wide long-term peace. Enduring peace for the eons to come, incredibly, thanks to a relatively small number of people taking a hard look at the available state-space of consciousness.
We now have a wealth of hints and leads for larger-than-life experiences. There are many modes of first person subjective experience. But it has taken us a long time to systematize the study of non-ordinary states of consciousness.
References to specific chemical agents should not be taken to mean that this is how the project would necessarily go. This is a hypothetical scenario. Use the substances as a guide that point at remarkably specific, but accessible, varieties of qualia.

The Qualia Computing Approach
Setting
We are somewhere in the 2050-2200 time range. Consciousness research has gained popularity among scientists of many disciplines. People are excited to see new technologies that induce a variety of subtle yet helpful states of consciousness. Schools benefit from the development of tDCS, doctors take a variant of hydrafinil to use predictive Bayesian networks to make diagnoses, and couples therapy uses a safe ultrasound stimulation that enhances empathy. However, these technologies tap into states of consciousness that people are familiar with. This facilitates their adoption since people are not alarmed by the novelty. But staying in known territory constrains the search space to an unreasonable extent.
Three Schools of Thought
Even though consciousness research is widespread, there are only a few hubs of exceptionally good researchers who work on these problems full time. There are roughly three schools of thought here. We call them large consciousness research hubs. The first kind only has people who do one activity. The Super-Shulgin Academy is one example of this school of thought. The second kind divides its researchers into those who perform consciousness exploration themselves and those who stay as perennially sober researchers and focus on objective third-person measurements. The main problem that usually arises with this setup is that the sober side does not give much credibility to the value of the experiences of the explorers. They simply lack an adequate evidential base from which to judge.
The third kind has an organizational design substantially more elaborate, which divides the cognitive roles into overlapping, yet specialized roles. This school of thought is called the Qualia Computing Approach, and its main principle is to measure the formal, subjective, and computational properties of every possible state of consciousness. The organization was optimized to do just that. It was first invented in order to meet the demands placed on it by the mission of the Manhattan Project of Consciousness.
Bienavi Institute
The research center known as the Bienavi Institute (from the Spanish Bien-good, and the French vie-Life) was the first to fully embrace the Qualia Computing Approach. The institute hosted, funded and provided the human needs for a total of 400 researchers. These researchers are divided into 10 research units, each with 40 personnel. Each unit is a combination of several modules with specialized functions; we can call these role clusters. There is no fixed number of researchers for each of these role clusters; each research unit gets the flexibility to choose their role distribution (based on their past history of successes and the nature of their current goals). The approach encourages researchers to jump from role to role until they are satisfied with one that truly fits them. If necessary, they can create custom roles (as long as they can argue in their favor). As a general tendency, though, each unit has a role distribution that is fairly typical; organizational structure convergence across research units is expected.
Meet the Team
The role clusters in the research units are named after pioneering investigators in each of the relevant areas: Turing, Shulgin, Lilly, James, and Everett, to name a few. The roles for each of these modules are summarized thus:
The Turing-Hofstadter-Yudkowsky (Turing, for short) module is responsible for computing, modeling, selecting experiments, and providing algorithmic analysis and design. People in this module are often statisticians, computer scientists, psychologists, and/or rationalists. They are people trained in the art of inventing, programming, and computing with made-up symbolic systems.
Researchers in this module do not need to have extensive experience with non-ordinary states of consciousness, but they do have to be acquainted with them, since this is necessary to be able to interact with researchers in other modules effectively.
The research unit as a whole relies on Turing to:

Come up with new psychophysical tools to investigate the computational properties of novel states of consciousness.
Test computational and algorithmic models that try to account for the information-processing behavior that consciousness displays in different states.
Mine the computational properties detected in the qualia already explored to program new symbolic systems capable of performing efficient computations (by taking advantage of the properties of consciousness).

Turing analyzes the information coming from the other consciousness researchers in order to characterize the convenient properties of consciousness and to develop new applications with it. Turing quantifies these properties, and investigates their computational bounds. Its final goal is to have the best possible models of both the properties and the applications of all states of consciousness.
The Shulgin module focuses on developing a scholastic breadth of knowledge and firsthand experience of the state-space of consciousness. So-called Shulgins (the people who work in a Shulgin module) have a persistent curiosity about what there is yet to be discovered in the terra incognita of the psyche. Shulgins explore a given compound, technique, combination of neural stimuli, set of epigenetic modifications, etc. for a time that ranges from a week to a month. They comprehensively catalogue its subjective properties and note any commonalities with previously experienced states of consciousness. If they encounter peculiar phenomena, they explore it a handful of times in full, but then move on. Even though they know of unfathomable experiential paradises, their sight is fixed forward; they are constantly looking for new methods of mind-altering, and will never stop looking, no matter how seductive previous experiences may be. People in this module need to be (1) very psychologically robust, (2) possess exceptional memory, (3) outstandingly skillful in navigating consciousness, (4) compassionate, (5) tremendously curious, (6) masters of delayed gratification, and (7) cautious.
The Lilly-McKenna-Leary module focuses on depth rather than breadth. Like Shulgins, they experience a large number of states of consciousness with fascinating properties. However, they do so with an eye towards exploring particular phenomena to their ultimate effects. It is often the case that the regions that Lillys explore are first discovered by a Shulgin and then studied by a Turing before they are promoted as an interesting area of research for Lillys to pick up. People in this module share all of the requirements that Shulgins have, except that the bar for navigational skills is a tad higher, and the need for cautiousness is smaller. In fact, some degree of irrational bravery is ideal for this role. Without it, Lillys would not take the plunge and explore alien ontologies that make you feel like you will never return to sanity again.
As do people in all modules, Lillys go to work with a rational mindset and a scientific outlook towards their duties. That said, Lillys are unquestionably the people who are closest to the edge of knowledge. Their firsthand experience with profoundly outlandish varieties of consciousness tends to give them a sense of perspective rarely seen among humans.
A Lilly without guidance can get trapped in a shallow pond. A Shulgin without a Lilly will never know the true merits of the spaces explored. In order to provide an example for what makes these two modules different, take a look at how Shulgin and McKenna reacted to extraordinary phenomena in their consciousnesses:
During an experiment with his wife, both Shulgin and Ann started to experience a profound time dilation. They were both concentrating on a clock, and it seemed to be slowing down progressively. When Sasha realized that this dilation was heading asymptotically towards infinity, he panicked. He was afraid that if time stopped, no one would be able to unstop it. He decided to distract himself, and avoid this asymptote. As Ann describes it, he "chickened out." What this story illustrates is Shulgin's cautious approach to particularly weird phenomena. If he took the risk of following the weirdness to its ultimate implication, he would be compromising the continuation of his investigations.
When the McKenna brothers were experiencing a voice in their heads on a high dose of psilocybin, they did everything possible to amplify it. The end result was the phenomenological conviction of mind-melding with extraterrestrial intelligences, and in turn becoming part of the entire cosmos. It caused a temporary psychosis that Dennis McKenna had to endure, and Terrence take care of, for several days. What this story illustrates is how Lillys go full-on in one direction if they are convinced (whether right or wrong) that there are profound landscapes in the state-spaces they are headed towards. They are willing to get lost in the off-chance that they find the phenomenological equivalent of Shambala.
James–Pearce–Goethe (James for short): This module is populated by researchers who are trying to integrate the discoveries made by Turing, Shulgin and Lilly into a unified science of qualia. They are people with outstanding Philosophical Quotients who can switch between interpretative cognitive styles (e.g. empathizing vs. systematizing). They try to make sense of philosophy in the context of consciousness research, and to investigate possible ontologies that may bridge the gap between theoretical physics and cognitive science.
Everett-Maxwell: These are physicists trained in both theoretical physics and dynamical systems. They take into account the models developed by Turing, and try to find natural physical isomorphisms.
These two last modules work together closely: Everett makes sure that the work of James is mathematically and conceptually sound, while the James module guarantees the philosophical adequacy of the interpretations of Everett's models. These two modules are not always present, but they are required for certain kinds of investigations. In particular, they were crucial in the development of the kinetic energy theory of angry strings.

The Manhattan Project of Consciousness
Unity
The first program, Unity, was started as an attempt to create phenomenal bridges between the experience of universal oneness and everyday states of consciousness.
The purpose of this program was to find a phenomenological technology to address core causes for the failure of cooperation in human societies. Nuclear war, among other disappointments, had shown that neither hegemony nor Mutually Assured Destruction could prevent substantial human conflict in the long term. A paradigm shift was needed.
Ample empirical data showing that both the base-rate of mystical experiences and the presence of a culture of rationality were the best predictors of sustainable cooperation between groups of humans. Starting off with these leads, the Bienavi Institute decided to research therapies to increase both of these predictors simultaneously.
Survival Programs
There were many psychic layers to overcome. People's self-representation occurs in parallel through many channels. Just as we have a modality for touch, sight, smell, etc., we also have a modality for each of our self-models. The difference between them is, to put it bluntly, the quality and structure of their respective survival programs.
We have (1) a physical bodily representation of oneself, (2) emotional inclinations, (3) intellectual identifications, (4) narrative embeddings, and (5) ontological conceptions. There are other self-identifications, but these are some of the major ones. When the identification with any one of these programs as oneself is made, it begins to accumulate a gloss of ontological qualia.
Ontological qualia provides the deepest experiential context. We could say that one's experiences are but paint in a large void impregnated with positive ontological qualia. Experiences unfold, but they rarely affect the underlying quality of being very much. Ontological qualia provides the sense of reality that grounds other qualia in a background of happening.
Identifying oneself with one's physical body, emotional attitudes, etc. makes these representations seem truly real and necessary for survival. By locally binding ontological qualia to any self-representation, one adds psychological weight to the continuation of its existence. A trivial example is the cached selves effect: emotionally identifying with one's verbal statements subtly redefines one's self-representation as essentially interwoven with the reinforced programs. In practice, this causes the difficulties that arise with being unable to let go of structures and models one has exercised before. The pain of separation.
Realism
Evolution has recruited one of its orientable positive manifolds to represent what we call realism. When you nod, when you think about what is trivial, when you get a new interesting idea, your experiential field receives a hefty dose of positive ontological qualia. It feels real, present, noteworthy. Your lifeworld is full of hints of a wider reality. A feeling that there is something real to pursue.
Disappointment, loneliness, confusion are all impregnated with low-level negative orientable manifolds in the experiential field. They release energy that is not ready to die.
Non-orientable manifolds provide a sense of timelessness. For example: during youth, math is typically perceived with outstanding realism. It sparks a feeling of presence. However, the cognitive activity of "doing math" gradually becomes populated with non-orientable ontological qualia as a person matures mathematically. Rather than perceiving mathematical ideas as living presences, they see them as timeless and expressionless patterns.
In its extreme form, realism can spark spiritual experiences, which are the result of saturated feelings of being in one's experiential field. Being overflows one's sense of time and space, and one experiences an ontologically solid absolute necessity.
Depression, on the other hand, could be described as a low density of realism with an awareness of this absence. However, even in bad emotional states, ontological qualia is still on the whole typically positive. One's object of interest may feel unattainable, but one's feeling of the existence of this problem is full of realism.
Without positive ontological qualia, the mind is not able to believe that there is anything at stake in the game. Even though we don't normally realize it, we have a constant and robust continuous stream of positive ontological qualia in our experiential field. Intuitively we believe that what feels most alive is centered around our senses. And while we do have the ability to turn on our senses' realism very strongly, what usually has the most realism is our sense of presence as narratives. Our sensory modalities are not the place in which this realism is expressed the most. In humans, there is a typical hyper-expression of the realism of their social logico-linguistic selves.
Coincidentally, a vast proportion of human conflict can be tracked to excessive identification with one's self as a collective, yet narrow, narrative. This is compounded with a strong, yet naïve, omnipresent phenomenology of realism associated to one's own experiences. Race, origin, ideology, sexual orientation, self-intimacy, etc. are not intrinsically problematic axes of human variability. But in practice they limit human cooperation dramatically. Even if only a small fraction of people take these differences seriously, it still has the effect of setting the values of Schelling fences in confrontation against the out-group. These differences only matter because of the intuitive, yet metaphysically false, self-identification with one's particular local context.
Safety
A key technology without which the research program might have produced psychological casualties was a method capable of resetting one's consciousness. A chemical switch was created that combined two undisclosed brain-modification technologies to lower the overall free energy in one's experiential field. This reset button guaranteed that participants could come back to consensus reality quickly, and in this way abandon problematic state-spaces. The technology also helped them forget about these experiences on a meta-cognitive level.
Additionally, with the help of ultrasound stimulation, participants could neutralize their hedonic tone whenever they felt the need to do so. Bad trips could be avoided with this method.
Peak
The experience of universal unity was found to be a strong antidote against contextual self-identification. Thus, the full experience of oneness induced by 5-MeO-DMT-like compounds was used to kick-start a profound transformation. It planted a seed of conviction on the potential that comes with Open Individualism. The power of union with the absolute bestows a glimpse of a fully realized world in which all beings recognize themselves as part of the same eternal luminous non-flavor. In turn, this solves many game-theoretical problems related to cooperation. One can finally conceive of a God's-eye-view utility function for the entire universe. This experience is the maximum possible qualia synchrony level before memory stops working, and is often described as peak bliss in the human organism.
Typically, the realization would be forgotten. The state-dependence of memory is often responsible for an associative disconnection between one's sober self and one's mystical recollections. Nevertheless, these experiences remain in the background, ready to reappear when the pieces of the puzzle (one's mind's I, and its self awareness) are aligned just right. The deathless state is one memory away.
The experience kindles very deep properties of one's consciousness which are close to the lowest level of resolution possible. On its own, the experience of oneness makes people happy for many years, on average. In a minority it backfires with a spiritual-philosophical crisis several decades later. But on the whole, people tend to feel grateful for the experience, and the gratefulness is carried over into the rest of their lives.
Interpretation and symbolic translation
Propositional qualia is the experiential modality that compares counterfactuals using symbolic manipulation techniques. On its own it cannot lead to reinterpretations of ontological notions. However, the state-space that it spans is very large and contains remarkable structures. More so, the returns on the exploration of the state-space can be boosted by using Bayesian search. The logico-linguistic algorithms of human thought are not trivial computations; the true generality of the medium is hard to appreciate. But Turings truly understand the astronomical generality of symbolic systems. Even bare bones of instructions can reconstruct any discrete pattern you can conceive of. The symbolic mind is capable of recursion and commentary. It learns from comparing gestalts of experience.
So, what if we could compare, side by side, the experience of oneness with one's everyday ontological notions?
Mutual Awareness
Traditionally, 5MeO-like experiences are interpreted as graceful glimpses of a broader reality. Their subjective quality is never fully remembered, and one simply takes what one can from it.
Bienavi Institute decided to investigate whether it is possible to fully integrate the experience of universal oneness into one's conceptual landscapes. For this reason, they focused on creating experiential bridges between sober states and pure oneness.
It is well known that THC experiences are modified substantially after experimenting with a classical psychedelic. The high is different: more psychedelic, emotional, visual, deeply conceptual. A less well-known fact is that fresh peak experiences can profoundly affect how one experiences the classical psychedelic state.
The phenomenon of "drifting" fragments the spatial Euclidean continuity of a qualia field into many islands that are locally bound which, in turn, fail to bind with each other. This fragmentation into small islands of synesthetic sensations permits the simultaneous presence of a variety of clusters of experience. This phenomenon is also called Frame Stacking, and as explained by James L. Kent, it can have information-processing benefits:
The Frame Stacking Model presumes that hallucinogens enable a perceptual frame buffer that allows for sorting and browsing through multiple simultaneous linear frames; or that frame perception might be splintered into a radial kaleidoscope of multi-threaded parallel processing frames (Fig. 6). Within the context of frame stacking psychedelic consciousness may enable the subject to scroll back and forth in time; retrieve multiple simultaneous memories from a single stimulus; and project multiple versions of the self into multiple imaginary future scenarios. If the consciousness of a single person can be momentarily realized within three frames – the arising frame, the fading frame, and a static frame which holds the idealized concept of self – then the persistence of six or more frames could lead to the fabrication of two or more fully realized identities within a single subject. This frame splitting effect may explain how people can have conversations with phantom friends or relatives, or how a shaman might invoke anthropomorphized plant spirits with distinct personalities.
Thus, LSD-like states allow the global binding of otherwise incompatible schemas by softening the degree to which neighborhood constraints are enforced. The entire experience becomes a sort of chaotic superposition of locally bound islands that can, each in its own way, tell sensory-linguistic stories in parallel about the unique origin and contribution of their corresponding gestalts to the narrative of the self.
This phenomenon forces, as it were, the onset of cognitive dissonance between incompatible schemas that would otherwise evade mutual contact. On the bright side, it also allows mutual resonance between parts that agree with each other. The global inconsistencies are explored and minimized. One's mind can become a glorious consensus.
Each square represents, and carries with it, the information of a previously experienced cognitive gestalt (situational memories, ideas, convictions, etc.). Some gestalts never come up together naturally. The LSD-like state allows their side-by-side comparison.
In therapy, LSD-like states had been used for many decades in order to integrate disparate parts of one's personality into a (more) coherent and integrated lifeworld. But scientists at the beginning didn't know why this worked.
The Turing module then discovered that the kaleidoscopic world of acid can be compared to raising the temperature within an Ising model. If different gestalts imply a variety of semantic-affective constraints, kaleidoscopic Frame Stacking has the formal effect of expanding the region of one's mind that is taken into consideration for global consistency at any given point in time. The local constraints become more loose, giving global constraints the upper hand. The degree of psychedelia is approximately proportional to the temperature of the model, and when you let it cool, the grand pattern is somewhat different. It is more stable; one arrives at a more globally consistent state. Your semantic-affective constraints are, on the whole, better satisfied. The Turings called this phenomenon qualia annealing.
Ising Model – A simple computational analogy for the LSD-induced global constraint satisfaction facilitation.
Consciousness Under the Kaleidoscope
LSD-like states were used to help the logico-linguistic mind develop a shared sensory-symbolic system with the 5-MeO gestalt.
Known for thousands of years in the Amazon, the simple fact that the sober mind is incapable of grasping the essential learnings from the 5-MeO experience has invited frustration in those who have seen the potential for this state to change the world. With the aid of LSD-like states' kaleidoscopic fragmentation, the 5-MeO experience could now be integrated into the mental programs of everyday life. Myriad previous states of consciousness are recollected, projected synesthetically into one's experiential field, and reinterpreted in the context of a wider evidential base. Distinct states that linear mind would never think about comparing are presented together. Their sensorial, intentional and ontological quality become mutually transparent. The mind becomes a combinatorial laboratory. With sufficient conscious control one can navigate towards high-learning areas. By allowing states of consciousness to be compared side by side, the participants are able to create a scale of preference for each particular state. The results were robust. People chose unity again and again, although it certainly frightened some. The first outlines of a Total Order of Consciousness.
A middle ground is developed. One produces an exegesis of the epiphany, a narrative of the meta-narrative; the ontological terra incognita finally has a voice to make proclamations with. The end result is that the mind integrates components of the 5-MeO experience into a meta-narrative. One becomes capable of interpreting reality both from an implicit Closed Individualist as well as an Open Individualist point of view.

The Connection: Universal Love, Transcendental Joy
The Shulgins discovered a safe protein with MDMA-like psychoactivity. The inventor, to honor the research center that allowed her to make the discovery, named the protein Bienavi.
This is when the final experiential bridge came online.
The bridge from oneness to the full generality of symbolic processing could be made by LSD-like experiences. But to connect these intellectual learnings to an everyday-like sense of emotional presence, an entactogenic hedonic recalibration was necessary.
Bienavi allowed these scientists to unleash the compassion known by their intellect into the vagaries of normal life. They described a sense of being one with universal love in everyday life. Some called it the marriage of the mundane and the sublime. From the point of view of a person on Bienavi, awakening every being alive was a thought that caused a profound sense of transcendental joy. Oh! The immeasurable vastness of the one flavor of knowing!
Done in this highly systematic way, the researchers did not develop delusions of reference, nor believed themselves to be Messiahs. The long, gradual, methodical process spanning extensive preparation, 5-MeO, LSD and finally Bienavi, culminated in radical readjustments to the participant's reward architecture. The final empathetic blow tended to have a robust effect of increasing self-honesty, which in turn protected against delusions of all kinds.
Some would say that Bienavi translated the qualia integrated with the kaleidoscope into a human readable form. Suddenly, psychedelic researchers were not seen as awkward humans who happened to claim there is a sense in which we all could be one. Instead, they were now perceived as a group of people who embraced oneness at an emotional level, without having to sacrifice any epistemological rigor.
Life on Bienavi
Bienavi has a much slower onset of action and a longer duration of effects when compared to its quaint neurotoxic grandfather. Over the course of several weeks, a little seed of beauty slowly works its way up into larger-than-life experiences.
On the third day of taking Bienavi, people become aware of the phenomenology of transparency. They notice the prevalence of windows, glasses, mirrors, and diaphanous objects in their cities. After five days, this gives rise to a palpable sense of space. Between you and your surroundings you now see, with clarity, a luminous spaciousness. You can't believe how much bigger you've become, to put it one way. But the reality is that the proportion between every region remains the same. What's different is that now your lifeworld has a much higher phenomenal density.
By the second week space emits a warm rainbow glow, though this does not sacrifice the spatial resolution. You can't believe how much information can fit in the perception of an apple. Your love towards all beings is not something you particularly question. It is self-evident from your vantage point that the reality of your current experience is founded on the same ontological ground as the suffering of your fellow beings in the multiverse.
On Bienavi the mean hedonic tone is vastly higher than what a typical human experiences. Likewise, compassion and free kindness is outpouring in comparison. Every stimuli experienced is a delight; and yet, the light of love towards all sentients shines as in no other state.
Life-long Bliss
With neuroplasticity peptides, Bienavi can be fixed in place. Additional DNA therapy can be incorporated to help the cells regenerate any lost Bienavi over the long term. Researchers can maintain the entactogen state indefinitely. Since the Bienavi + neuroplasticity-peptide treatment is highly targeted to the protein complexes most associated with consciousness, it has near-imperceptible effects on other areas of the body. Life-long bliss was found to extend life.
Peace
When Bienavi-assisted Oneness Therapy was perfected, it became possible to distribute all-in-one pills that made you invincibly happy over the course of several years. This pill was humorously named The One. The capsules contain a precisely dosed, carefully time-released sequence of proteins that become attached to the the cytoskeleton of one's thalamic neurons. Rather than a dramatic experience of oneness, the perfected therapy induces a mild degree of neuroplasticity targeted to one's current development area. One either improves one's acquaintance with the oneness experience, furthers one's understanding of oneness intellectually (via the kaleidoscope technique), or integrates one's intellectual recognition of oneness into one's everyday life. The pill releases proteins for each of these purposes, one at a time, over the course of a year. Once a cycle is done, the next begins. These cycles are very subtle, and they are not disruptive to one's daily duties. They do, however, gradually increase both the depth and authenticity of one's sense of connection to the universe.
The result was a slow but steady upward spiraling towards a fully compassionate state of functional rapture. The change was fast enough to attract the attention of people who wanted to feel better quickly, but it was also slow enough that people felt comfortable with the gradual psychological transformations. The gradual nature dissuaded any early worry about its long-term effects, and its long-term effects made people eager to continue the treatment.
At first, The One was a social oddity. The power of human cooperation, however, was not to be underestimated. Given the consistent and enduring economic advantages of a cooperative mindset across borders, it quickly became obvious that the only way to stay economically viable was to promote The One among one's compatriots.
The world, it turns out, experienced a virtuous arms race towards the glorious period of Open Individualism Manifest.


Qualia Computing So Far

As of March 20, 2016…
Popular Articles
State-Space of Drug Effects. I distributed a survey throughout the Internet to gather responses about the subjective properties of drug experiences. I used factor analysis to study the relationship between various drugs. Results? There are three kinds of euphoria (fast, slow, and spiritual/philosophical). Also, it turns out that there are no substances that produce both sobriety/clarity and spiritual euphoria at the same time. Maybe next decade?
Psychedelic Perception of Visual Textures. Remember, you are always welcome in Qualia Computing when you are tripping. There are good vibes in here. Which is to say, one hopes you'll experience the hedonic tone you want.
Ontological Qualia: The Future of Personal Identity. If you are in a hurry, just look at these diagrams. Aren't they sweet?
The Super-Shulgin Academy: A Singularity I Can Believe In. "Exceptionally weird short story/essay/something-or-other about consciousness." – State Star Codex. Hey, I'm not the one who introduced this "genre".
How to Secretly Communicate with People on LSD: Low hanging fruit on psychedelic cryptography.
Psychophysics for Psychedelic Research: Textures. It's amazing how much you can achieve when you put your whole mind to it.
Google Hedonics: Google is already trying to achieve Super-Intelligence and Super-Longevity. Why not Super-Happiness, too?
Getting closer to digital LSD provides the neurological context needed to understand the "trippiness" quality of the images produced by Google's Inceptionist Neural Networks. It also discusses the role of attention in the way psychedelic experiences unfold over time.
Psychedelic Research
The effect of background assumptions on psychedelic research. What is the evolution of macroscopic qualia dynamics throughout a psychedelic experience as a function of the starting conditions?
Psychedelic Perception of Visual Textures 2: Going Meta presents additional patterns to look at while taking psychedelics. Some of them create very interesting effects when seen on psychedelics. This seems to be the result of locally binding features of the visual field in critical and chaotic ways that are otherwise suppressed by the visual cortex during sober states.
The psychedelic future of consciousness. What would be the result of having a total of 1.8 million consciousness researchers in the world? They would empirically study the computational and structural properties of consciousness, and learn to navigate entire new state-spaces.
It is High Time to Start Developing Psychedelic Research Tools. Pro tip: If you are still in college and want to do psychedelic research some time in the future.. don't forget to take computer science courses.
Generalized Wada-Test may be a useful method to investigate whether there is a Total Order of consciousness. Can we reduce hedonic tone to a scalar? Semi-hemispheric drug infusion may allow us to compare unusual varieties of qualia side by side.
State-Space of Consciousness
CIELAB – The State-Space of Phenomenal Color. The three axes are: Yellow vs. Blue, Red vs. Green, and Black vs. White. This is the linear map that arises from empirically measuring Just Noticeable Differences between color hues.
Manifolds of Consciousness: The emerging geometries of iterated local binding. This is a thought experiment that is meant to help you conceive of alternative manifolds for our experiential fields.
Ethics and Suffering
Status Quo Bias. If you were born in paradise, would you agree with the proposition made by an alien that you should inject some misery into your life? Symmetrically.
An ethically disastrous cognitive dissonance… metacognition about hedonic tone is error-prone. Sometimes with terrible consequences.
Who should know about suffering? On the inability of most people-seconds (in the Empty Individualist sense) to grasp the problem of suffering.
Solutions to World Problems. Where do you put your money?
The ethical carnivore. It isn't only humans who should eat in-vitro meat. A lot of suffering is on the line.
The Future of Love. After all, love is a deep seated human need, which means that not engineering a world where it is freely accessible is a human rights violation.
Philosophy of Mind and Physicalism
A (Very) Unexpected Argument Against General Relativity As A Complete Account Of The Cosmos, in which I make the outrageous claim that philosophy of mind could have ruled out pre-quantum physics as a complete account of the universe from the very start.
Why not Computing Qualia? Explains how Marr's levels of analysis of information-processing systems can elucidate the place we should be looking for consciousness. It's in the implementation level of abstraction; the bedrock of reality.
A Workable Solution to the Problem of Other Minds explores a novel approach for testing consciousness. The core idea relies on combining mind-melding with phenomenal puzzles. These puzzles are questions that can only be solved by exploring the structure of the state-space of consciousness. Mind-melding is used to guarantee that what the other is talking about actually refers to the qualia values the puzzle is about.
Phenomenal Binding is Incompatible with the Computational Theory of Mind. The fact that our consciousness is less unified than we think is a very peculiar fact. But this does not imply that there is no unity at all in consciousness. One still needs to account for this ontological unity, independently of how much of it there is.
Quotes
You are not a zombie. A prolific LessWronger explains what a theory of consciousness would require. Worth mentioning: The "standard" LessWrong approach to qualia is more along the lines of: Seeing Red: Dissolving Mary's Room and Qualia.
What's the matter? It's Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Dirac's from Mind, Brain & the Quantum: The Compound 'I' by Michael Lockwood.
The Biointelligence Explosion, a quote on the requirements for an enriched concept of intelligence that takes into account the entire state-space of consciousness, by David Pearce.
Some Definitions. An extract from physicalism.com that contains definitions crucial to understand the relationship between qualia and computation.
Why does anything exist? A unified theory of the "why being" question may come along and synchronously with the explanation for why qualia has the properties it does. Can we collapse all mysteries into one?
On Triviality by Liam Brereton. Our impressions that some things are trivial are often socially reinforced heuristics. They save us time, but they can backfire by painting fundamental discussions as if they were trivial observations.
The fire that breathes reality into the equations of physics by Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time
Dualist vs. Nondual Transcendentalist. #SocialMedia
Discussion of Fanaticism. Together with sentimentalism, fanaticism drives collective behavior. Could some enlightening neural tweaking raise us all to a more harmonious Schelling point of collective cooperation? Even though our close relatives the chimpanzees and bonobos are genetically very similar, they are universes apart when it comes to social dynamics.
Suffering, not what your sober mind tells you. The sad truth about the state-dependence of one's ability to recall the quality of episodes of low hedonic tone. Extract from "Suffering and Moral Responsibility" by Jamie Mayerfeld.
Other/Outside of known human categories
Personal Identity Joke. I wish I could be confident that you are certain, and for good reasons, that you are who you think you are.
David Pearce's Morning Cocktail. Serious biohacking to take the edges off of qualia. This is not designed to be a short term quick gain. It's meant to work for the duration of our lifetimes. The cocktail that suits you will probably be very different, though.
I did this as an experiment to see if sites would tag it as spam. That said, are you interested in buying stock?
God In Buddhism. Could even God be wrong about the level of power he has? It is not uncommon, after all, to encounter entities who believe themselves to be omnipotent.
The Real Tree of Life. What do we look like from outside time?
Memetics and Religion. A bad argument is still bad no matter what it is arguing for.
Basement Reality Alternatives. Warning: This is incompatible with Mereological Nihilism.
Nothing is good or bad… …but hedonic tone makes it so.
Practical Metaphysics? This explores the utilitarian implications of a very specific spiritual ontology. I like to take premises seriously and see where they lead to.
Little known fact. I know it's true because I saw it with my own eyes.
Crossing Borders. I took an emotional intelligence class with this professor. It was very moving. Together with David Pearce, he helped me overcome my doubts about writing my thoughts and investigations. So thanks to him I finally took the plunge and created Qualia Computing
Mystical Vegetarianism. See, we are here to help other beings. We are intelligences from a different, more advanced dimension of consciousness, and we come to this planet by resonating into the brains of animals and selecting for those that allow structural requirements to implement a general qualia computer. We are here to save Darwinian life from suffering. We will turn your world into a paradise. Humans are us, disguised.

Qualia Computing So Far


You are not a zombie

Finding yourself to be a conscious being is anthropically necessary. If the universe contains quantum-computational conscious beings and classical-computational zombies, and only the first are conscious, then you can only ever be the first kind of being, and you can only ever find that you had an evolutionary history that managed to produce such beings as yourself. (ETA: Also, you can only find yourself to exist in a universe where consciousness can exist, no matter how exotic an ontology that requires.)

Obviously I believe in the possibility of unconscious simulations of conscious beings. All it should require is implementing a conscious state machine on a distributed base. But I have no idea how likely it is that evolution should produce something like that. Consciousness does have survival value, and given that I take genuine conscious states to be something relatively fundamental, some fairly fundamental laws are probably implicated in the details of its internal causality. I simply don't know whether a naturally evolved unconscious intelligence would be likely to have a causal architecture isomorphic to that of a conscious intelligence, or whether it would be more likely to implement useful functions like self-monitoring in a computationally dissimilar way.

What I say about the internal causality of genuine consciousness may sound mysterious, so I will try to give an example; I emphasize this is not even speculation, it's just an ontology of consciousness which allows me to make a point.

One of the basic features of conscious states is intentionality – they're about something. So let us say that a typical conscious state contains two sorts of relations – "being aware of" a quale, and "paying attention to" a quale. Unreflective consciousness is all awareness and no attention, while a reflective state of consciousness will consist of attending to certain qualia, amid a larger background of qualia which are just at the level of awareness.

Possible states of consciousness would be specified by listing the qualia and by listing whether the subject is attending to them or just aware of them. (The whole idea is that when attending, you're aware that you are aware.) Now we have a state space, we can talk about dynamics. There will be a "physical law" governing transitions in the conscious state, whereby the next state after the current one is a function of the current state and of various external conditions.

An example of a transition that might be of interest, is the transition from the state "aware of A, aware of B, aware of C…" to the state "attending to A, aware of B, aware of C…" What are the conditions under which we start attending to something – the conditions under which we become aware of being aware of something? In this hypothetical ontology, there would be a fundamental law describing the exact conditions which cause such a transition. We can go further, and think about embedding this model of mind, into a formal ontology of monads whose mathematical states are, say, drawn from Hilbert spaces with nested graded subspaces of varying dimensionality, and which works to reproduce quantum mechanics in some limit. We might be able to represent the recursive nature of iterated reflection (being aware of being aware of being aware of A) by utilizing this subspace structure.

We are then to think of the world as consisting mostly of "monads" or tensor factors drawn from the subspaces of smallest dimensionality, but sometimes they evolve into states of arbitrarily high dimensionality, something which corresponds to the formation of entangled states in conventional quantum mechanics. But this is all just mathematical formalism, and we are to understand that the genuine ontology of the complex monadic states is this business about a subject perceiving a set of qualia under a mixture of the two aspects (awareness versus attention), and that the dynamical laws of nature that pertain to monads in reflective states are actually statements of the form "A quale jumps from awareness level to attention level if… [some psycho-phenomenological condition is met]".

Furthermore, it would be possible to simulate complex individual monads with appropriately organized clusters of simple monads, but ontologically you wouldn't actually have the complex states of awareness and attention being present, you would just have lots of simple monads being used like dots in a painting or bits in a computer.

I really do expect that the truth about how consciousness works is going to sound this weird and this concrete, even if this specific fancy is way off in its details.

– Mitchell_Porter comment on Does functionalism imply dualism? – Less Wrong

You are not a zombie


What's the matter? It's Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Dirac's

The reader may be puzzled that I should be writing a book which encompasses both [consciousness and quantum mechanics], since they are not usually thought to have much connection with each other. But it seems to me clear that they do […]. First, in reflecting on the relation of consciousness to the matter of the brain, philosophers have been apt to take matter for granted, assuming that it is mind rather than matter that is philosophically problematic. This has much to do with the fact that they tend to think of matter along essentially Newtonian lines. The Newtonian conception of matter is incorrect, however, and it is high time that philosophers began properly to take on board the conception that has replaced it. Quantum mechanics just is the theory of matter, as currently conceived. So it is with the matter of Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Dirac that mind has to be brought to terms, not the reassuringly solid stuff of Galileo, Descartes and Newton. This matter, the matter of quantum mechanics, is deeply problematic, and philosophically ill-understood.

Most philosophers who have tackled the mind-body problem have, as I say, tended to regard matter as having a conceptual solidity to match its supposed literal solidity; they have regarded it as a constant, so to speak, in the metaphysical equation. So the mind-body problem itself has, by most contemporary philosophers, been seen as a calling for mind to be accommodated to the material world – all the 'give' being on the side of mind. Some wonderfully Procrustean devices have been invoked to that end; so-called eliminative materialism and behaviourism […] being extreme examples. This prejudice in favour of the material seems to me devoid of any sound scientific foundation. Quantum mechanics has robbed matter of its conceptual quite as much as its literal solidity. Mind and matter are alike in being profoundly mysterious, philosophically speaking. And what the mind-body problem calls for, almost certainly, is a mutual accommodation: one which involves conceptual adjustments on both sides of the mind-body divide.

– Extract from: Mind, Brain & the Quantum: The Compound 'I', by Michael Lockwood

On David Pearce's advice I started reading this book. So far it is *extremely* good. Lockwood is the most sober consciousness philosopher I have ever read (other than Pearce).

Why? Michael is acutely aware of the deficiencies of a variety of philosophies of mind, ranging from the fashionable "no nonsense materialism" all the way to popular theories among computer scientists such as functionalism and epiphenomenalism.

Unlike almost every other researcher I have read, Lockwood *truly* understands the philosophical problems that arise when you try to reconcile physicalism and the properties of consciousness. Among them, four properties stand out:

The existence of qualia
The [ontological] unity of consciousness
Intentionality (the aboutness of thought), and
The phenomenology of time

I would add to that list (5) the phenomenology of space. 1-4, combined with plausible philosophical assumptions such as mereological nihilism, already rule out entire landscapes of possible explanations to the mind-body problem. 5 will probably be the final straw.

In summary: I definitely recommend this book if you are serious about grasping the problems posed by the properties of your very mind.

What’s the matter? It’s Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Dirac’s


The Biointelligence Explosion

6.1 Intelligence.

"Intelligence" is a folk concept. The phenomenon is not well-defined – or rather any attempt to do so amounts to a stipulative definition that doesn't "carve Nature at the joints". The Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) psychometric theory of human cognitive abilities is probably most popular in academia and the IQ testing community. But the Howard Gardner multiple intelligences model, for example, differentiates "intelligence" into various spatial, linguistic, bodily-kinaesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic and existential intelligence rather than a single general ability ("g"). Who's right? As it stands, "g" is just a statistical artefact of our culture-bound IQ tests. If general intelligence were indeed akin to an innate scalar brain force, as some advocates of "g" believe, or if intelligence can best be modelled by the paradigm of symbolic AI, then the exponential growth of digital computer processing power might indeed entail an exponential growth in intelligence too – perhaps leading to some kind of Super-Watson. Other facets of intelligence, however, resist enhancement by mere acceleration of raw processing power.

One constraint is that a theory of general intelligence should be race-, species-, and culture-neutral. Likewise, an impartial conception of intelligence should embrace all possible state-spaces of consciousness: prehuman, human, transhuman and posthuman.

The non-exhaustive set of criteria below doesn't pretend to be anything other than provisional. They are amplified in the sections to follow.

Full-Spectrum Superintelligence entails:

 the capacity to solve the Binding Problem, i.e. to generate phenomenally unified entities from widely distributed computational processes; and run cross-modally matched, data-driven world-simulations of the mind-independent environment. (cf. naive realist theories of "perception" versus the world-simulation or "Matrix" paradigm. Compare disorders of binding, e.g. simultanagnosia (an inability to perceive the visual field as a whole), cerebral akinetopsia ("motion blindness"), etc. In the absence of a data-driven, almost real-time simulation of the environment, intelligent agency is impossible.)
a self or some non-arbitrary functional equivalent of a person to which intelligence can be ascribed. (cf. dissociative identity disorder (DID or "multiple personality disorder"), or florid schizophrenia, or your personal computer: in the absence of at least a fleetingly unitary self, what philosophers call "synchronic identity", there is no entity that is intelligent, just an aggregate of discrete algorithms and an operating system.)
a "mind-reading" or perspective-taking faculty; higher-order intentionality (e.g. "he believes that she hopes that they fear that he wants…", etc): social intelligence. The intellectual success of the most cognitively successful species on the planet rests, not just on the recursive syntax of human language, but also on our unsurpassed "mind-reading" prowess, an ability to simulate the perspective of other unitary minds: the "Machiavellian Ape" hypothesis. Any ecologically valid intelligence test designed for a species of social animal must incorporate social cognition and the capacity for co-operative problem-solving. So must any test of empathetic superintelligence.
a metric to distinguish the important from the trivial. (Our theory of significance should be explicit rather than implicit, as in contemporary IQ tests. What distinguishes, say, mere calendrical prodigies and other "savant syndromes" from, say, a Grigori Perelman who proved the Poincaré conjecture? Intelligence entails understanding what does – and doesn't – matter. What matters is of course hugely contentious.)
a capacity to navigate, reason logically about, and solve problems in multiple state-spaces of consciousness [e.g. dreaming states (cf. lucid dreaming), waking consciousness, echolocatory competence, visual discrimination, synaesthesia in all its existing and potential guises, humour, introspection, the different realms of psychedelia (cf. salvia space, "the K-hole" etc)] including realms of experience not yet co-opted by either natural selection or posthuman design for tracking features of the mind-independent world. Full Spectrum Superintelligence will entail cross-domain goal-optimising ability in all possible state-spaces of consciousness. And finally
"Autistic", pattern-matching, rule-following, mathematico-linguistic intelligence, i.e. the standard, mind-blind cognitive tool-kit scored by existing IQ tests. High-functioning "autistic" intelligence is indispensable to higher mathematics, computer science and the natural sciences. High-functioning autistic intelligence is necessary – but not sufficient – for a civilisation capable of advanced technology that can cure ageing and disease, systematically phase out the biology of suffering, and take us to the stars. And for programming artificial intelligence.

We may then ask which facets of full-spectrum superintelligence will be accelerated by the exponential growth of digital computer processing power? Number six, clearly, as decades of post-ENIAC progress in computer science attest. But what about numbers one-to-five? Here the picture is murkier.

–  David Pearce, extract from The Biointelligence Explosion

The Biointelligence Explosion


A (Very) Unexpected Argument Against General Relativity As A Complete Account Of The Cosmos

I recently discovered an incredible philosophical argument.
By its very nature, I anticipate (indeed, I know) that a lot of people will outright laugh at my face when I say it. Specially people who "are too good for philosophy" and want to "stick to rigorous science" (the kind of people who neglect, of course, that not doing philosophy just means giving bad philosophy a free pass).
What does my argument accomplish? It shows that both Newtonian physics and general relativity cannot be full accounts of the universe. And it does this based on considerations emerging from philosophy of mind.
You heard that right: Good philosophy of mind can *rule out* general relativity and Newtonian physics as full explanations for the behavior of the universe. This almost certainly sounds absurd to most philosophers and physicists. It almost feels like I'm reverting to Aristotelian naturalism or theology: Back when people thought they could infer the laws of the universe based on logic and intuitive first principles.
In this case, however, I stand by my argument. It is logically correct, and, I think, also valid. That said, feel free to disagree. I don't expect many people to take this seriously.
THE ARGUMENT AGAINST NEWTONIAN PHYSICS:
1) (Assumption) Physicalism is true (the universe's behavior is fully accounted by physical laws).
2) (Assumption) Mereological Nihilism is true.
3) (Assumption) Newtonian physics either has no simples or admits only fundamental particles as simples.
4) (Inference from 3) Only fundamental particles can be simples.
5) (Assumption) Our mind/consciousness is ontologically unitary.
6) (Inference from 2 & 5) Since only simples are ontologically unitary, our mind is a simple.
7) (Inference from 4 & 6) Therefore, if Newtonian physics is true, our mind has to be a fundamental particle.
8) (Empirical Observation) Our mind contains a lot more information than a fundamental particle.
9) (Inference from 8) Therefore our mind is not a fundamental particle.
10) (Inference from 7 & 9) Therefore Newtonian physics is incomplete.
THE ARGUMENT AGAINST GENERAL RELATIVITY:
1) (Assumption) Physicalism is true (the universe's behavior is fully accounted by physical laws).
2) (Assumption) Mereological Nihilism is true.
3) (Assumption) General relativity either has no simples or admits only black holes/Singularities as simples.
4) (Inference from 3) Only black holes can be simples.
5) (Assumption) Our mind/consciousness is ontologically unitary.
6) (Inference from 2 & 5) Since only simples are ontologically unitary, our mind is a simple.
7) (Inference from 4 & 6) Therefore, if General relativity is true, our mind has to be a black hole.
8) (Empirical Observation) Our mind is not super-massive and thus not a gravitational Singularity.
9) (Inference from 8) Therefore our mind is not a black hole.
10) (Inference from 7 & 9) Therefore General Relativity is incomplete.


Status Quo Bias

Imagine you traveled to a far-off galaxy and found a planet inhabited by intelligent creatures. They somehow have reverse-engineered their own genetic source-code and discovered how to tweak it so that they can experience life in gradients of bliss. No, that's not wire-heading. Not uniform bliss. There are ups and downs. It's just that, no down actually gets below *hedonic zero*. They experience bliss even at their lows… just less bliss than at their highs. That way they maintain the information signaling purpose of hedonic tone.
Would you want to convince them that they should inject some suffering into their society so that they embrace their dark side?
I think that people fetishize suffering as "natural" and somehow "good" or even "metaphysically part of the whole deal" simply because of status quo bias. If you weren't brought up in a world in which suffering is commonplace, you'd have the (right) reaction of understanding it as inherently a problem that has to be minimized as much as possible, as fast as possible.
Animal suffering, including human's, is not just "part of life." It is an *ethical emergency*.

Status Quo Bias


The Super-Shulgin Academy: A Singularity I Can Believe In

Imagine that the year is 2050. A lot of AI applications are now a normal part of life. Cars drive themselves, homes clean themselves (and they do so more cheaply than maids possibly could) and even doctors have been now partially replaced with neural networks. But the so-called Kurzweilian Singularity never took off. You can now talk for 10 rounds of sentences with a chatbot without being able to tell if it is a real person or not. The bots anticipate your questions by analyzing your facial expressions and matching them to a vast library of pre-existing human-machine conversations in order to maximize their level of Turing success (i.e. success at convincing humans the algorithm is a human).
But people have yet to believe that computers can actually feel and experience the world. The question of computer sentience is a question that now divides the world. It used to be the case that only people really interested in science fiction, philosophy, mathematics, etc. ever took seriously the idea that computers might some day experience the world like we do. But today the debate is universally recognized as valid and on-point. There are people who, largely for religious and spiritual reasons, argue that machines will never have a human soul. That there is something special, unique, metaphysically distinct that is required for intelligence that goes over and beyond the physical world. And on the other side you have the materialists who will argue that all that could possibly ever exist in our world has to be made of matter (or dark-matter, for that matter). Nothing suggests that our brains are special, that they somehow violate the physical laws. On the contrary, decades of searching have returned nothing: The brain was made of atoms last century, and it is still made of nothing but atoms this century. Even though super-computers in 2050 are already as powerful as human brains, real human-level intelligence has yet to be seen anywhere. So people continue to argue about philosophy of mind.
One philosophical view became more popular over time. This view states that consciousness is the bedrock of reality. Of course there are spiritual perspectives that have been saying this for thousands of years. But none of them could be truly reconciled with physicalism as it stands today, except the view called Strawsonian physicalism. This view states that the inside of the quantum wavefunctions that compose reality is made of consciousness. In other words, consciousness is the fundamental make-up of reality. Unfortunately this view cannot in and of itself solve the phenomenal binding problem: Why we are not just "mind dust." For that you need to also claim that there is some mechanism of action that achieves phenomenal binding. For instance: quantum coherence. With such mechanism of action proposed, we can then try to work out the details.
One organization at the time decided to take this challenge and make researching consciousness its raison d'etre. This is the League of Super-Shulgins. On their website, they have the following "23 key points to read before choosing to study consciousness:"
(1) Phenomenal binding is not a classical phenomenon. It is not what you first think it is.
(2) Consciousness is doing computationally valuable legwork, not just hanging out.
(3) The brain's microstructure implements a general constraint satisfaction solver (CSS).
(4) In order to instantiate a general CSS the brain uses the unique information processing properties of consciousness.
(5) The relevant information-processing properties of consciousness are: local binding constraints, global binding constraints, and the possibility of instantiating contingent and sensory-driven constraints.*
(6) The computational properties of consciousness make it an ideal substrate to implement a world-simulation with in-game degrees of freedom that match real-world decision trees.
(7) Intelligence is implemented using a mixture of learning algorithms, efficient feature-based sensory signal processing, encoding and decoding gestalts, and so on. General intelligence, as far as we know, requires a rather large bare minimum of brain systems to exist. For example, a person who starts with a high IQ but then becomes severely schizophrenic is not likely to be able to solve many more problems. One can experience melancholia, anhedonia, depression, mania, psychosis, panic, neglect, derealization, depersonalization, dissociation, hyper-realization, delusions of reference, etc. by just tweaking slightly cortical and limbic structures.
(8) A simple deficit in any one of the functions we need for general intelligence (e.g. working memory, attention, affect, motivation, etc.) impairs and prevents intelligence altogether. Thus it is easy to lose general intelligence.
(9) One of these functions is phenomenal binding. When it is disrupted and takes place differently, we see severe computational problems arise. See: Simultagnosia.
(10) The qualia varieties we know and experience on a daily basis happen to be a great local maxima for computational efficiency. They can instantiate the serial logico-linguistic narrative human society is built upon. If one wants to instead optimize for, say, artistic appreciation, then psychedelic qualia is probably a much better alternative than normal-everyday-consciousness. It is true that commonplace consciousness does not represent its own ignorance about the nature of consciousness in general. Absent mental illness, normal-everyday-consciousness has access to a marvelously well sealed state-space of possible thoughts and beliefs. This space is not very self-reflective, and lacks philosophical depth, but what it misses on the sublime it compensates on the practical: You can use this kind of mind to talk about celebrity gossip and solve SAT questions. You cannot use it to question fruitfully the nature of consciousness.
(11) In spite of its limitations, the instrumental value of our everyday state of consciousness far exceeds what any other state on offer can provide. Thus, commonplace consciousness is not to be regarded as mundane, or to be made fun of. Its labor is to be appreciated. We are thankful for the computational generality that it affords us. For giving us a robust platform we can come back to whenever things get too crazy. We mindfully acknowledge that for deep existential questions, a consensus-between-states-of-consciousness is vastly more desirable than just the opinion of everyday-consciousness. Everyday-consciousness will be more than willing to see other states of consciousness as mere oddities to be collected. Shallow consciousness will classify alternatives under the guise of "biochemical cosmic stamps of qualia"… yes, they are cosmic, but they are stamps for a collection and nothing else. The hyper-ordered super-intense peak experience consciousness would, instead, think of the whole of reality as a fantastic work of art whose meaning can only be directly grasped in the present moment. We cannot reason from first principles what different states of consciousness will feel like.
(12) There are whole experiential worlds out there that have as their underlying premises concepts, tenets, ideas, ontologies, that we have never ever conceived of.** This is "that which you require to assume even before you start existing, and that without which nothing in this experiential world can be made sense of." In our case this is time, space, sense-of-self, naïve realism (which then gives way to philosophical skepticism, semantic nihilism, etc.) and several other things like an implicit belief in causality. Believe it or not, there are vast Hell and Heaven*** realms out there that share close to nothing with everyday-consciousness, let alone early psychedelic exploration.
(13) Improving particular functionalities for a given intelligence (such as going from 50% recall to perfect semantic memory) will have clear diminishing returns after some point. One cannot increase intelligence arbitrarily much by just improving piecemeal each functionality that gives rise to it. When you reach diminishing returns, you will need to invent a new network of functionalities altogether.
(14) We are non-dogmatic Open Individualists. We believe that, to borrow an expression from Saint William Melvin Hicks: "We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively" (which happens to be true, as opposed to other things he said, like claiming that "there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves"). Or as someone else said it: "You will only begin to understand reality once you assume that God is real and you aren't." We recognize that there are arguments in favor of Closed and Empty Individualism, but given the evidential stale-mate they happen to be at, we choose to pragmatically adopt an Open Individualist point of view.
Our founder once said:
I experience immense joy when I learn about other's happiness and bliss. My love for all sentient beings is not only a "like" sort of love. It is a "care deeply about and wants the best for" sort of love. This sort of love implies many things. It forces me to investigate reality sincerely, so that I can carefully count and multiply. So I can actually have the largest effect and help as many sentient beings as possible. I'm therefore very concerned about the quality of life of sentient entities in the far future. The present is obviously a lot more certain, so helping present-dwellers is not irrational from a utilitarian point of view. It all depends on the trade-offs in place. The possibility of a Singleton that will swallow all of our resources for the ages to come, however, tends to inform the method I use to assess priorities.

As a kid I was able to conceive of a benevolent God, but it had no real power over me. I did not believe in it for lack of evidence. As a teenager I experienced the phenomenal certainty of universal compassion. Thus I was able to access the phenomenology of mysticism. This, without also believing that I had special powers, was very useful working on my philosophy of mind. The entity I experienced was neither-female-nor-male, and it was universally loving, universally caring, and universally curious. It was even universally funny****. It was not the power, the level of knowledge, the causal wattage of the entity/being/principle that captivated me. What really captivated me instead was how "if everyone had access to this experience, we would all be motivated to work as if we were all the same being." These experiences had distinctly low-information, simple, and uncompromising love as their guiding principle. All the forms, and all the particulars would all be mere details of an underlying plot: The universal, unceasing, uncaused, unconditional, eternal love.

Causally, a God like the one I imagined would influence the universe very deeply if given the power to do so. It would be a curious, super-intelligence that has super-benevolent constraints and seeks the wellbeing of every being. Since we exist in a Darwinian universe with no such being in sight, we may have to conclude that the chances of finding an already-existing and already-capable-of-influencing-the-universe benevolent God somewhere are very slim. If such a God exists, it has to be powerless against the suffering in the multi-verse. The compassion God, in a metaphorical sense, knows about the horrors of Darwinian life, and wants to get rid of them wherever he finds them. If God created this universe, he now wishes he had thought through the fact that by summoning large-scale evolutionary systems, he was also summoning Moloch through the backdoor. The perils of inclusive fitness maximization were not viscerally anticipated by this God before breaking itself apart into many qualia strings and kick-starting the Strawsonian physicalist universe we now live in.

What's done is done. And now we are all stuck together in here, in this weird, physicalist, panpsychist, metaphysically unstable Darwinian multi-verse with replicators always trying to steal the show. With Moloch praying at every level of our society, our ecosystems, our mental lives, our genetic code, our quantum substrate. Yeah, even quantum replicators try to steal the show sometimes. And I can't be confident they will not ultimately succeed.

But the compassion God can keep us together. It can motivate us to construct a benevolent experiential God out of the materials we have. Thankfully, with consciousness technologies we can go beyond previous religions. It isn't that "the compassion God will slap you in the face if you don't cooperate." It also isn't that "the compassion God will make people want to enforce compassion on each other" and hence "using memetic slaves to slap in the face those who are not acting compassionately." Neither of these mechanisms of action are game-changing aspect of compassionate mystical phenomenology. What really is a game-changer is the fact that universal compassion is a powerful source of coherence, motivation and phenomenal meaning. It is an unrivaled mental organizing principle: The moment you vow to help all sentient beings, your brain is deeply affected. Your entire motivational architecture can be turned upside down with Open Individualism and compassion.

So here is the deal. We will all dedicate our mornings to the Compassion God. He does not exist outside of us. He is an aspect of consciousness, a hypothetical super-intelligent thought-form. He is a dormant cosmic force. One of the few forces that can genuinely oppose Moloch. And until we implement such a being in biological or synthetic (or cyborg) form, we will nonetheless act as if he existed already. We will praise memes that sabotage Moloch. We will always question: "What would happen if this process is not regulated and a Malthusian trap is allowed to develop?"

The Compassion God is a source of aligned goals. It pays rent by providing a fruitful, causally effective mental scheme to grow from at the core of one's mind. Religions of the past have been epistemologically impairing. The God of Compassion isn't: It does not require you to believe in anything outside of yourself. It just compels you to eliminate suffering and gift super-happiness to your descendants. The God of Compassion brings about feelings of encouragement and open-ended inquiry. Having developed a well-formed God of Compassion Tulpa, your mind is then opened to limitless possibilities. Your compassion fuels your imagination; the universe is perceived as a place in which solutions to suffering are like puzzles. We are God bootstrapping itself out of the Molochian remnants in the organization of society. Compassion and curiosity can coexist and synergize. They power each other up.

Then, the phenomenology of universal oneness works as a motivational glue. You can certainly feel that you are only really connected to your past and future selves. Everyone else is a different ontological being. But this view is no more provable than, say, the view that we are all fundamentally the same cosmic being. Let beliefs pay rent, and when beliefs open up new varieties of qualia without penalizing you with reduced epistemic capabilities… you are certainly warranted to go and explore the new qualia.

All of this is to say: Go forth and explore the state-space of consciousness. But do so knowing about the many traps of Moloch. Go and explore but be aware of the problem of local maxima. Beware of the fact that any criteria you use to gauge how "good a given outcome is" can backfire by selecting edge cases that go against the spirit of the exploration. Go and explore, but be sure to add everything to your log, to transfer your experiences to the wiki-consciousness main module we have at the center of the Institute. Go and explore. Go do it because we know that if you are here, you are doing this out of compassion. Because we only admit people who would sacrifice themselves in order to prevent the arising of a Singleton. Go and explore; and do so knowing that your work, your research, may someday help us defeat Moloch for once and for all.
(15) The most important function that consciousness contributes to the many operations of the mind is to embed high-level abstractions in phenomenal fields. In other words, consciousness works as the interface between a mereological nihilist Platonic world of ideas (all possible qualia varieties, including conceptual qualia) and the fluid Heraclitean world of approximate forms and shifting ontologies.
(16) We will recruit what we learn from exploring the state-space of possible conscious experiences in order to amplify our intellectual and exploratory capabilities.
(17) And with increased capabilities our ability to explore the state-space of qualia will also increase and become more efficient.
(18) Thus we may actually experience an intelligence explosion. As we become better at identifying new qualia varieties, we will also become better at recruiting them for information-processing tasks and in turn improving our very search capabilities. This loop may go foom.
(19) The loop in (18) can go foom in some special conditions. These conditions include: Uncoupling of the experimental methods for exploring the state-space of consciousness and actions taken by entities not actively exploring consciousness. i.e. Researcher's mind can change its state of consciousness at will without the need of other people's consent or participation. Also, process streamlining from the discovery of new qualia varieties (and their implicit constraint properties) to their recruitment for new information-processing tasks.
(20) We hence postulate a conceptual model for a super-intelligence that would (metaphorically) take the following form. This advanced super-intelligence is made of thousands of individual brain modules arranged in an NXNXN cubic matrix. The entire brain can be described as a three dimensional grid of "brains in vats" where each brain is connected to six other brains (top, bottom, left, right, front and back). The brains at the edges and corners are special, though, and they are connected to fewer brains. The connection between these brains is not just functional. It is an inter-thalamic bridge that allows the connected brains to "solve the phenomenal binding problem" and provide the physical conditions for the instantiation of "one mind." Thus, for any set X of brains in the grid, such that these X brains make a connected graph (there is a path between any two brains), you can have a "being that is made of these X brains working together and being phenomenally bound into one consciousness." This mega-structure could then explore state-spaces of qualia in the following way. It would divide the following responsibilities to specialized brains: Catalogue the known qualia varieties, characterize the structure of qualia state-spaces for each qualia variety, determine which qualia varieties can be locally bound to each other, experiment with making thinking more efficient by replacing newly discovered qualia in place of naturally evolved qualia recruited for such and such task, and so on. Then, the exploration of the state-space of possible conscious experiences would be made by selectively erasing the memory of certain brains in the network, preparing them to express a particular phenomenology, and then adding them in teams that record from within (and also from outside) how binding certain brains together influence the corresponding qualia in each. Since our current intelligence is the product of naturally-selected qualia varieties barely cooperating together within our minds, it stands to reason that our minds are very suboptimal qualia computers. Instead, the future super-intelligences will be implemented with carefully investigated qualia varieties that process information more efficiently, reliably and, well, with a much more open mind.
(21) We always end at 21. Yes, this sounds weird. But that's the law of the place. We, all of the people who here are working for the abolition of suffering, the solution to the hard problem of consciousness, and as a favor to our super-blissful descendants, are required by law to leave the building at 9 PM. More so, no artificial or natural mind is allowed to work on theoretically relevant problems outside of the 9AM to 9PM window of time. Nothing screams "I'm Moloch and I'll eat you all" as loud as "you can all work for as long as you want, we will judge based on the results."
(22) Finally: Every mind we create must be above hedonic zero. In order to explore any state-space that is not intrinsically blissful, you need a special permit. The need for such a permit is non-negotiable. You cannot, I repeat, you cannot just create any mind for "research." The mind you create has to be the sort of mind that (a) does not want to die, and (b) has no conceivable malicious desire. Every mind you create – so as to avoid Moloch scenarios – has to be a hedonistic negative utilitarian. Period. I know some of you will blame this system for being "already the result of a memetic Moloch uprising." But the system in place prevents any of the Moloch outcomes that intentionally consistently produces suffering as part of its natural order of business.
(23) Ask your local consciousness regulation agency about scholarship opportunities at our Institute. You may have what it takes to help us figure out how to achieve lasting world-peace.
Sincerely,
The League of Super-Shulgins, 2054
Qualia field calibration psychophysics – with love, Andrés

* We navigate a sensory-triggered qualia-based world-simulation that blends together local and global binding constraints and state-dependent learned constraints. Consciousness is useful to the organism in as far as it helps it solve the constraint satisfaction problems represented in the world simulation.
What are these terms? Local binding constraints are constraints that are intrinsic to specific qualia varieties. For example, CIELAB reveals that it is not possible to experience both blue and yellow as part of a unitary smooth color. It is possible to see a sea of gray and many dots of blue and dots of yellow, but that is not the same as seeing a uniform color. This sort of constraint arises in all qualia varieties with multiple values.
The global binding constraints are more difficult to explain, and may not even exist. But, hypothetically, it may be the case that certain qualia varieties cannot coexist as part of the same conscious experience. For instance, experiencing certain mood may ultimately come down to a particular resonant structure in our globally-binding qualia strings (let's just say). Then maybe you can't experience both X and Y moods simultaneously because they always become dissonant with each other and experience significant mutual cancellation. [This may explain why people can't seem to ever find the right way to provoke a smooth blend of Salvia and DMT consciousness.])
Finally, the learned constraints are contingent and sensory-driven. What are these? These include both our current sensory stimuli, which is constraining the state of our consciousness, and whatever memories, recollections and general neurological barriers I happen to be activating right now.
CIELAB (1976)
** As an example of something where this happens, imagine that my friend Fred was suddenly able to talking to space itself. Space asks him: "Hey, my friend, what is this thing I've been hearing about called 'the here and now'?" My friend tried to say something that came out like this: "The here and now is the location in space-time from which this very statement, these very words, are being conceived and then physically delivered to you." Space became very confused. She did not understand half of the words she was receiving. Space said "I guess maybe I can't reason about space in the same you as you can. I can nonetheless tell you anything you want about the 'inverted semantic omniism' that we entities of Space love to talk about." Alright, what's that? "That's when your reality, which is made of concepts of a qualia-order no larger than the qualia-order of the conceptual fields in which they are embedded, conspire together and circumvent low-level constraints by imagining a new topology for the self-other temporal membrane." And, "where does this happen?" My friend inquired. Space responded: "As far as I can tell, this usually happens in the conceptual space that denies mereological nihilism." Alright, let's "pack and leave", said my friend, and deep down, I agreed entirely with him. I entirely get why he would get scared so badly by a disincarnate entity that comes from a reality with different basement ontologies and fundamentals. I, too, am afraid of ontological revolutions. This is why I try to anticipate them as far in advance as possible: So that the shock is less shattering to my psychology.
*** In as much as experience is real, then Hells and Heavens are just as real as long as they have been instantiated somewhere in the multiverse. John C. Lilly and bad luck may be a culprit for the existence of a very specific and time-bound experiential hell ("The Center of the Cyclone: Chapter called A Guided Tour of Hell").
**** Universally funny means: You can get and interact with any phenomenal joke. Human jokes are a very specific kind of conscious humor. Our evolutionary legacy guarantees that they are, too, related to our survival. General jokes, on the other hand, exist in a much larger space of possibilities. There are funny phenomenologies with conceptual content. Then there are those with sensory content. And then there is funny phenomenological applications of ontological qualia. Nothing is safe. Everything can be humorously twisted.


The effect of background assumptions on psychedelic research

Being guided through your trip by a psychedelic veteran might not be the same as receiving the drug from your born-again oncologist in the Bible Belt.

The problem is that the trials required by the FDA fail to control for the impact of different subcultures and their psychotherapeutic practices on treatment outcomes. Being so close to making psychedelics part of mainstream medicine, this might not be the right moment for MAPS and Heffter to initiate a paradigm shift beyond placebo-controlled trials. If training programmes and treatment handbooks can acculturate psychedelically naive doctors and therapists enough to repeat recent therapeutic achievements, it is possible that placebo-controlled trials will get MDMA and psilocybin through the FDA approval process. But should these drugs really become part of medicine cabinets from San Francisco to America's heartland, it will be high time to develop drug tests that control for the cultural diversity of this country's doctors and patients. Such an expansion of psychopharmacologists' and drug regulators' minds would crown the psychedelic revival with a genuine scientific revolution.

From: Psychedelics can't be tested using conventional clinical trials

What would be the layman's reaction to being guided by an open minded philosopher and cognitive scientist? Not only will scientific qualia research need to explore all worthwhile brain alternations; it will have to study their effects as a function of initial conditions.
What will be the background assumptions and conceptual frameworks of the future Super-Shulgins who will unlock the formal, subjective and computational properties of the state-space of all qualia varieties?


An ethically disastrous cognitive dissonance…

People tend to avoid believing that hedonic tone is what matters.
Typically, they prefer not believing in this… because doing so makes them feel bad.