Qualia Research Institute

I'm super curious to know if there's been neural correlates of these first-order representations and higher order.

I just spoke with Andres Gomez-Emelson, who runs the Qualia Research Institute, and he's a mathematician and consciousness researcher, and he's kind of making the bet that conscious experience is symmetrical and is a geometric pattern to conscious experience.

And sort of the more symmetrical an experience becomes, the more pleasurable it is.

And he brings in a lot of music.

There's a really cool, very short article Andres Gomez wrote.

You know who he is? He's the co-founder of Qualia Research Institute.

Brilliant guy.

Mathematician, scientist, and he's also very experienced with psychedelics and meditation and things like this.

And it's already kind of becomes like a mathematical argument, but it's testable.

And one of the things they're doing in Qualia Research Institute is testing these kinds of ideas by very sophisticated people.

building software that adheres to a certain frequency and then watching how people respond to it on different substances, seeing if it matches it, because the ideas come from the theory that I just described, and then they try to map it onto something functional.

For example, one of the things to make it more clear for people, because I know it sounds very esoteric, one of the things they did, which is amazing, is that they realized not just the frequency, But the exact wave types and their frequency – because you can have a frequency of a wave that is like this.

I have a positive impression of OAIF bio grantmaker Jacob Trefethen from his previous work at OpenPhil and expect great things from him.

I know less about Wojciech Zaremba, the OpenAI co-founder who's been put in charge of their AI resilience fund, which seems to have safety or alignment grant making in its remit, but Wojciech's Wikipedia entry says he's on the board of the Qualia Research Institute, one of my favourite organisations, and an incredibly bullish sign about his personality, thought process, and ethics.

Good luck to everyone involved.

Here's an unfortunately paywalled New York Magazine article on the topic, including an interview with Olly Habrika of Lighthaven and the previously unknown-to-me fact that during the worst part of the FTX scandal and blowback, EA Philosopher spokesperson Will McCaskill, quote, "...continued stepping away from activism entirely to retrain and work as a DJ," end quote.