I think all neuroscientists, all philosophers, all psychologists, and all psychiatrists should basically drop whatever they’re doing and learn Selen Atasoy’s “connectome-specific harmonic wave” (CSHW) framework. It’s going to be the backbone of how we understand the brain and mind in the future, and it’s basically where predictive coding was in 2011, or where blockchain was in 2009. Which is to say, it’s destined for great things and this is a really good time to get into it.| Opentheory.net
Michael Edward Johnson, Symmetry Institute. 12 June, 2024. Crossposted from the Seeds of Science journal; available as a PDF there.| Opentheory.net
Some people have an amazingly positive energetic presence, such that you feel yourself better just being near them. Better as in happier, and better as in easier to be the person you wish to be. There are many different ‘flavors’ of this: I’ve noticed it’s easier to feel at peace around some friends, easier to have fun around others, easier to build around others. To some degree this is about subjective social chemistry, but there are definitely ‘objective outliers’ here: people w...| Opentheory.net
I.| Opentheory.net
New whitepaper: Qualia Formalism and a Symmetry Theory of Valence| Opentheory.net
A unification of Buddhist phenomenology, active inference, and physical reflexes; a practical theory of suffering, tension, and liberation; the core mechanism for medium-term memory and Bayesian updating; a clinically useful dimension of variation and dysfunction; a description of sensory type safety; a celebration of biological life.| Opentheory.net
A friend asked me if I thought future AIs could be conscious; my answer was ‘kind of, but not in the way most people think.’| Opentheory.net
I. Better SETI through qualia| Opentheory.net
Context: I co-founded a philosophy and neuroscience research institute and designed the high-level logic for several neurotech devices.| Opentheory.net
In September 2020 I gave a presentation for Johannes Kleiner’s Mathematical Consciousness Science series. The recording turned out a bit quiet; here are my slides with brief commentary (from an April 2022 perspective).| Opentheory.net
Note: I originally wrote this for the QRI website. It can be thought of both as context for the intuitions which generated the Symmetry Theory of Valence (original; condensed primer), and offering Noether’s work as a generally promising research thread for formalizing phenomenology. | Opentheory.net
May 2023 note: in May 2022 I stepped down from the QRI board and left the organization. I wish them well and intend on continuing to pursue my research. I have updated several parts of this document to speak only for myself.| Opentheory.net
Note: I was saving this for the launch of the Symmetry Institute, but given the recent discussions around REBUS/CANAL, Deep CANALs, and Neural Annealing I pushed it forward.| Opentheory.net
I’ve been at Vitalik Buterin’s Zuzalu co-living community for the past month and the relationship between crypto and AI alignment has been a hot topic. My sense is that crypto is undergoing a crisis of faith, and also that most good futures involve a crypto that successfully overcomes this crisis. In particular, I see a great deal of value at the intersection of crypto and recent research on “AI constitutions”.| Opentheory.net
Michael Edward Johnson, 11-28-19; mike@opentheory.net| Opentheory.net