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Unlock Higher Quality of Consciousness - Annealing, Coherence, & Jhana | Scott /w Andrés from QRI

Can Consciousness Be Explained By Math? Andrés Gómez-Emilsson of Qualia Research Institute - watch?v=o2JvvQUxmvA

Table of Contents

Qualia: The Paint of Subjective Experience

What does qualia mean?

Andres: It's my favorite word because it refers to something so important and overlooked.

The easiest way to describe what it means is to remind people if when they were kids, they ever wondered "is the blue that I see the same blue that other people see?" This is a challenging question because imagine if the mapping between frequencies of light to the feeling of the color you experience was different, would you be able to figure that out with conversation? Not necessarily, because all you can say to distinguish one color from another is the relationship it has to other colors. If the network of relationships between colors has symmetries, it might be impossible to tell if we are seeing the same blue.

Qualia is a much more general term - the blueness of blue would be a particular quale, an individual facet or quality of experience. But smells, tactile sensations, the way thoughts feel - not the sensory input that triggers it but the way it presents itself within your experience - that is qualia.

The Qualia Research Institute investigates properties of qualia: the network of relationships between qualia, the space of possible qualia and ways they can be put together to create experiences, what makes qualia feel good or bad. All those topics are within the purview of our research.

Qualia is the easiest way to describe the subjective, felt quality of experience - the blueness of blue, the smell of coffee, the way thoughts feel. Qualia is the paint with which your experience gets painted. The Qualia Research Institute investigates properties of qualia from a scientific perspective.

So one way to think about it is qualia creates our subjective experience?

Andres: I would even say qualia is the paint of our subjective experience, the thing with which your experience gets painted.

Qualia Formalism: Mapping Consciousness Mathematically

I’ve heard you talk about this notion that people have a “shape of consciousness”. What do you mean by that?

Andres: This is a super important concept that I've been thinking about for a long time. The person who formalized that way of thinking was my co-founder Mike Johnson in his book Principia Qualia in 2015, where he defines the concept of "qualia formalism".

Qualia formalism says not only is qualia real as the paint of our subjective experience, but for any given system generating an experience, there will correspond a mathematical object such that the features of that object map onto or are isomorphic to the features of our experience. In other words, you can find a mathematical model such that your experience right now is a configuration of that model, and by analyzing its mathematical features you can infer things like if you're feeling cold or warm, if time is moving fast, etc. That is what the Qualia Research Institute focuses on.

More concretely, if we zoom in within qualia formalism, we have valence structuralism - the idea that what makes an experience feel good or bad is one of those features, one of those mathematical structures within an experience.

A key concept is qualia formalism, the idea that for any system generating an experience, there will correspond a mathematical object such that the features of that object map onto or are isomorphic to the features of the experience. In other words, your experience right now could be described as a configuration of a mathematical model, and by analyzing its features you could infer new things about your experience.

So someone could look at their equation and understand more about their experience than they do today?

Andres: Yes, you would probably figure out things about your experience that you’re not even able to attend to but are actually real and modifying your experience. You could only infer it with one of these methods.

Coherence: The Key to Positive Experience

What have you learned from a mathematical or scientific perspective about what makes for a high quality subjective experience of consciousness?

Andres: There are various ways of answering this. What we focus on at QRI is the most fundamental way of tackling the question - what features of experience make it feel good or bad? This is a DIFFERENT WAY OF THINKING about the problem.

When people think about what makes a happy experience, they think of external conditions - DIET, EXERCISE, SLEEP, SOCIAL INTERACTIONS, STRESS LEVELS. Those are the five most important things that predict well-being. You could add air quality too. But those are indirect, modulating internal systems. The actual feeling of happiness and joy is an internal configuration.

Mainstream neuroscience might focus on neurotransmitter systems like DOPAMINE, SEROTONIN, ENDOGENOUS OPIATES and say that's what modulates happiness. Or they might say it's about functional localization, that there are pleasure centers and stimulating those gives rise to joy and happiness.

But as we read that literature at QRI, we see those as correlates - things highly correlated with positive mood but not the mood itself. They mediate or condition it.

What we have learned is that a very key feature that makes an experience feel good is coherence and phase locking between coupled oscillators in your nervous system. The most extreme versions of this are the jhanas and some drugs like 5-MeO-DMT which generate a state of hyper-coherence across many frequencies. There's neurological and phenomenological evidence for this perspective, but it really does seem peak mystical experiences involve extreme levels of coherence such that waves can travel linearly without resistance. You feel a very clean resonant chamber without distortions, imperfections or defects. VERY SMOOTH GEOMETRY is usually what feels very good.

Can you explain what coherence means and how it expresses in our system?

Andres: Here's a metaphor: Imagine there's a fire in a village and you're trying to extinguish a burning house. You form a line of people from the lake, everybody has a bucket, they take water from the lake and pass it down the line. For the water to travel properly from the lake to the fire, people need to be COORDINATED. When you put the bucket of water to the left, the water arrives and they are prepared to pass it to the next person.

To be in coherence or phase locked means when you pass the water, the other person is precisely ready to receive it. There's a PERFECT MATCH, no friction or spills, the water just flows SMOOTHLY. That would be a state of coherence.

What we have learned is that a very key feature that makes an experience feel good is coherence and phase locking between coupled oscillators in your nervous system. Peak experiences like the jhanas and some psychedelic states generate hyper-coherence across many frequencies.

Neural Annealing: A Paradigm for Transformation

What have you learned about making it easier for our default state to be coherent?

Andres: The paradigm we developed, originally by Mike and I and further refined, is the concept of neural annealing. The latest iteration is neural field annealing, a quite technical theory.

Core Concepts

The core concepts are:

  • Energize the system: You need to energize your system in a clean and consonant way to kick you out of a distant attractor.
  • Cool slowly: Then cool slowly in a way that maximizes chances for phase locking to happen.
  • Break up dysfunctional patterns: Essentially you want to break up dysfunctional overused patterns causing dissonance or topological defects in the field, which happen early on during energization.
  • Maximize coherence: Then you want to cool down slowly with mindfulness and positive mood to get an interlocking effect as you cool down.

Widespread Applications

This general pattern applies to pretty much any transformative technique we have looked at. It explains what's going on conceptually with:

  • Saunas
  • High-intensity interval training
  • Breathwork
  • Psychedelics
  • Meditation
  • Yoga

All of these inject fairly neutral energy, not something semantic or loaded but just pure energy, and that is best for these practices. You want to lean into that to get this process started. Jhana practice is like that - there are many ways to achieve those meditative states but they all involve energizing, breaking up patterns, and then coherence.

You mentioned activating practices like breathwork and meditation that a lot of people may not be familiar with. Could you describe the slow down part more specifically? A lot of people think meditation is just for calming down.

Andres: Meditation encompasses a large cluster of practices.

  • There are techniques just for calming down, lowering arousal and feeling relaxed. If you do those, you will also see important transformations and I would argue that is also through an annealing process, but it's more subtle to explain.

However, usually the most effective quick methods of advancing meditation involve practicing several techniques that take into account different parts of the process. You have a way of:

  1. Generating energy
  2. Focusing on positive mood
  3. Calming down

For example, one method we developed called "metta annealing" starts with:

  1. 10 minutes of Wim Hof breathing which is really arousing and raises energy a lot.
  2. Then you move to a period of really positive mood with loving-kindness meditation. While you're energized, you tune into that positivity which provides harmony and coherence.
  3. Then you switch to very relaxing music that crystallizes that coherence.

I will say there are Buddhist branches that just focus on relaxation and over a longer period that also takes you to very clean levels of harmony. But it's not as spectacular or ecstatic and takes longer.

The paradigm we developed to explain what's going on conceptually with many transformative techniques is neural annealing. The core concepts are: 1) Energize the system in a clean way to kick it out of dysfunctional patterns, 2) Cool slowly to maximize chances for phase locking and coherence, 3) Break up dysfunctional patterns early on during energization, and 4) Maximize coherence during the cooling with mindfulness and positive mood. This general pattern applies to practices like saunas, HIIT, breathwork, psychedelics, meditation, yoga, etc.

Embodiment Enables Empathy

Heart Math is another organization I’ve heard talk about coherence, approaching it from more of a heart-mind coherence angle which I guess is slightly different than what we’re discussing.

Andres: It is part of the picture. Heart Math fascinates me - they're correlating things like EEG coherence, heart coherence, and the coherence between those two systems, showing it's related to a sense of connection or empathy. For me that's valuable information and clues, but you still have to put it in a conceptual framework to tie it all together.

Probably you've noticed very empathetic people tend to be very embodied. There's some correlation between how in tune someone is with their own body and how much they can empathize with others, put themselves in other people's shoes. I don't think it's perfect but let's say they correlate at 0.6 or 0.7.

So what accounts for why embodiment and empathy are related? I think embodiment is a kind of coherence between peripheral systems and the central nervous system. It's when you phase lock your stomach, heart and brain, or those three systems are interlocked. That's a state of embodiment.

Moreover, I strongly suspect the way we model other people involves these peripheral systems. When you're talking to someone, you may not realize it but there's a model of the other person in your stomach and heart, or in the interaction between them.

My current understanding is that for you to be in tune with other people, you have to be in tune with your models of other people. And for that, you need to be in tune with your stomach and heart. The moment you're actually in tune with that, the suffering and happiness of people will affect you because those are coupled with your central nervous system.

Heart Math fascinates me. They're showing the correlation between EEG coherence, heart coherence, and empathy. Probably you've noticed very empathetic people tend to be very embodied. Embodiment is a kind of coherence between peripheral and central nervous systems. Moreover, I suspect the way we model other people involves these peripheral systems. So to be in tune with other people, you have to be in tune with your models of other people, which requires being in tune with your stomach and heart.

Topology Explains Individuality Within Unified Consciousness

How does this jive with the concept of tuning into other people’s energy fields, having your channels open, being able to perceive information outside your field - which seems to correlate with contemplative practice?

Andres: My default research paradigm is to use the indirect realism framework about perception - anything you experience is a feature of your world simulation, something your body, nervous system and electromagnetic field is generating.

So by default, I approach this by saying when you feel you're getting in tune with someone else, you're actually getting in tune with a part of yourself that is modeling that other person. A lot of feelings of being in tune with others are delusional - you think you made a strong connection but the other person barely knows you. That happens a lot with personality disorders.

At the same time, I am open to psi effects like telepathy. It's relatively unlikely but some things have happened in my life that make me think there may be something to it. In which case I would default to it being some kind of electromagnetic resonance effect. But a lot of weird things would have to be explained, like why can this electromagnetic effect have such wide reach? The amplitude of a signal drops with 1/R^2 where R is distance. You being able to sense something that happens in another country should be really difficult because that signal is almost completely lost in noise.

But people who do a lot of contemplative practices develop powers so to speak. They will say they can remote view in France or something. So something else is happening. The one data point I think there's probably something to is being able to sense when a family member dies, because that's very well documented. I know a lot of people it happened to, it happened to me. If there's something weird I can't explain, I would point to that.

But by and large, for most of our research we make the assumption these are internal systems. What's happening is you're modulating internal coherence between different components of yourself.

Scott: Your perspective doesn’t consider the notion of a unified field that we exist within?

Andres: It does, but that doesn't entail the sense of connection is necessarily real. These are not incompatible. In our ontology, the universe is a gigantic field of consciousness, and that I'm pretty sure of.

What makes me so sure is ruling out other possibilities, like the possibility that consciousness emerges at a certain level. It's a long conversation but essentially there are two options - either consciousness emerges at some level or consciousness is fundamental all the way down. After a lot of pondering and writing essays, I have inferred that consciousness cannot emerge at a certain level, so it has to be at the base level. Therefore the universe is made of consciousness, which aligns with a lot of ancient wisdom. Many people have said this before.

One key way in which this realization or theory may be more formal or scientifically compatible compared to more metaphorical spiritual visions is that we also have a theory for what is responsible for creating individuation. How is it that within this field of consciousness we are part of, we find a "you" that has an individual perspective separate from everything else?

In religious or mystical texts, you find metaphors like the universe is a gigantic ocean and we are waves in the ocean. A great metaphor, but waves don't have boundaries, they are softly interconnected with everything. Whereas your experience right now has a clear boundary, a definite amount of information and qualia.

So we want something more concrete than a wave. Some people talk about eddies, but we talk about topological pockets - a formalized version where the field lines wrap around and create loops. When you have that, you have an objective boundary and everything inside is causally separated from everything outside. We think that's what creates individuality.

Understanding Topology

I’ve heard you use the word topology before in the context of consciousness and I’m not 100% sure what it means. I’d love to learn more.

Andres: Here's a metaphor: Imagine the surface of a balloon is the field of consciousness. The question becomes, how do you get a region of that balloon to segment out so you can say "this is me" or "this is my experience" within the field of consciousness?

If you bend it, that's not enough because the field is still just a plane, the surface. But if you take two sides of the balloon and twist them in opposite directions, there is a precise moment where the center collapses and you get two balloons connected by a point.

That point is special because it's a difference in degree - how twisted it is - and at a certain threshold there's a difference in kind. At some precise moment it collapses and segments. That is a topological change, where a bunch of points collapse into a singularity or there's a transformation that changes what is connected with what. Do you have one plane or two planes, one sphere or two spheres, one hole or two or three holes - that is what topology modulates.

Think about it - if you have two balloons connected by a point and you're in one balloon wanting to go to the other, you have to go through the pinch point. There's no other option. That is what I think is happening. If you want to go from your experience to my experience, you have to go through some zero-dimensional singularity that erases information to get to my experience. That's why we don't have access to each other, because the information collapses. There's a bottleneck preventing information transmission between us.

A key insight is that the topology of the consciousness field explains individuality and boundaries between minds. If the universe is a field of consciousness, topological changes like a pinch point between two connected balloons are what segment regions corresponding to individual minds. Information collapses at these bottlenecks, preventing transmission between minds. Deep states of meditation may briefly break down these topological boundaries.

I can’t help but wonder about the realized masters I’ve read about where that boundary seems to dissolve, where they seem to know what’s going on in my head, do lots of far out things.

Andres: I have to be honest, I haven't interacted with meditation masters who I got the impression were psychic. Maybe that's just the type of people I've interacted with. But I have interacted with a good number of highly attained meditators, gone on retreats with people who qualify as fourth path, classically enlightened people.

What struck me about them is how nice and emotionally stable they are. Maybe my neuroticism cancels out a bit around them, some things turn off and it's very pleasant to be with them. They do describe a permanent abiding in centeredness, some sense of not being inside or outside, no sides or center in their experience.

But I would still tend to interpret that as them changing their internal configuration. What they're doing is getting rid of the center within their experience. But because part of their experience is representing the outside, that feels like removing boundaries between inside and outside.

That would be from moment to moment, when they're eating breakfast or going for a walk. A special case where I do think maybe there is an actual breakdown of boundaries is moments of cessation, deep in meditation typically on retreat (although it depends on the practitioner). There are moments in meditation where everything synchronizes and you briefly disappear. It's not that everything turned dark or felt timeless or empty, it's a complete disappearance, 100% like you did not exist for a few moments.

I suspect that is where the field lines actually break open and you do briefly become part of the rest of the field. But that's not possible to remember because the field doesn't have neurons or cells for memories. It's an impossible to remember experience, would be my guess.

Geometric Frustration: Physical and Psychological Tensions

You’ve mentioned the word “geometric frustration” before. What does that mean?

Andres: If you have a square lattice of a magnetic material, and each atom in the lattice can be aligned up or down magnetically, there will be some stable configurations that minimize the discrepancy of each atom with its neighbors. Let's say all atoms are perfectly aligned - that minimizes discrepancy.

But if instead you have a triangular lattice, you're in trouble because there's no way of positioning each magnet so they're aligned with neighbors. The shape of the lattice makes it so you will always be frustrated. There will always be tension, regions where two positive poles are pointing the same direction or two negative poles. The shape makes internal conflict inevitable.

Think about lifting weights in some sense, if you're not doing a more general annealing practice. You're pumping out energy but not uniformly. You may not notice your energy channels are actually in a geometrically frustrated state. There are regions of your energy body pointing the same direction but then all at once you pump your system full of energy. All those conflicting regions become highlighted because there's too much energy, it will go through all paths, and it turns out some paths are in internal conflict.

Whereas something like yoga might minimize that. It's about making energy flow regular and smooth, getting rid of kinks or geometric frustration over time.

We’ve touched on the potential physically induced geometric frustration. What about things like suppressed emotions and trauma that seem to show up in the energy body?

Andres: One way of looking at trauma is your body will essentially tag a whole range of movements, a cluster of muscle operations, as unsafe.

  • You went into a certain situation, you were in certain body configurations, and something terrible happened.

  • Your body and mind will say that cluster of configurations leads to bad outcomes, so let me torch a one-mile radius around any configuration like that so you never get in that situation again.

Not only does that behaviorally prevent you from getting into a situation like that again, it also prevents you from even thinking of those situations.

  • Any muscle movement somewhat similar to that situation will be forbidden.
  • It may turn out many of those muscle movements are essential for other things too, so you may be blocked in many ways even though your system just wants to block you in a particular way.

Psychedelics do something to relax these patterns again.

  • It's a process of annealing, introducing buzzing sensations to destroy pre-existing patterns.
  • All of a sudden this whole cluster of forbidden movements becomes accessible again.

How do you think about concepts like when one of those experiences gets brought into awareness, it can be healed, allowing greater fluidity and capacity for energy to move?

Andres: Healing Trauma: Two Approaches

There are various ways of healing trauma, and two broad moves can be really helpful when confronting a traumatic experience during psychedelic experiences, MDMA, ayahuasca, or spontaneously:

1. Equanimity

2. Loving-kindness

These approaches have different mechanisms of action but are synergistic and help each other.

Equanimity: Not Resisting

  • According to Shinzen Young's paradigm in "The Science of Enlightenment," equanimity is the idea of not resisting.
  • Suffering equals pain times resistance. You could have a lot of pain but if you have zero resistance, that just feels like a sensation, not suffering.
  • If the trauma comes up (very negative images and emotions), being able to experience it without resisting, just really feeling it without trying to avoid it, trains and increases your stress dissipation capacity.
  • You're making your nervous system more capable of dissipating stress over time because you're not getting in the way of that dissipation.

Loving-Kindness: Generating Positive Emotion

  • Loving-kindness is quite a different approach.
  • Generate very positive emotion, like imagining a happy dog or a memory that makes you happy, tuning into that feeling.
  • Imagine you're gifting that feeling to your traumatic memory. You're saying "yes you went through that, but here I am with a lot of love, here to accept, relieve and heal you."
  • Loving-kindness provides symmetry and coherence that allows reorganizing the very dissonant patterns from the trauma.
  • The fears from the trauma emit harsh, incongruent, chaotic waves. The loving-kindness emits very coherent, consonant waves.
  • If loving-kindness is dominant during the experience, it will entrain the trauma into a coherent, pleasant state, and you won't really have it anymore.

Intensity Matters

  • The intensity of the loving-kindness really matters.
  • Applying very high power, high wattage loving-kindness will get rid of the trauma much faster.
    • It's very worth trying to get that power up. Crank the love!

Geometric frustration refers to inherent tensions or conflicts due to the shape of an underlying lattice. Think of magnets on a triangular lattice - there's no way to align them without frustration. This can manifest physically, like uneven energy flows in the body after intense exercise. Or psychologically, as when trauma tags a cluster of experiences as unsafe, blocking off movements and thoughts in a wide radius. Psychedelics relax these blocked patterns through an annealing effect, allowing the traumatic material to be re-experienced and healed.

Empirically Validating Theories of Consciousness

These are essentially theories that you have. I know you’re on the cutting edge of things happening in this space. Are we anywhere close to being able to prove any of this with instruments?

Andres:

Working Hard on Psychophysics and Neuroscience Research

  • We're working really hard at it, doing a lot of psychophysics research, neuroscience research, analyzing neuroimaging datasets, collaborating with people in academia.

Are We Close? Starting to Have Solid Empirical Hints

  • I think we are starting to have solid empirical hints, like what I was talking about with various kinds of coherence in peripheral systems.
  • We also polished a write-up about visualizing tactile sensations that provides empirical evidence of the correlation between consonant vibrations and positive valence versus dissonant vibrations and negative valence.
  • We have some preliminary evidence of that - the data is in that write-up.

Positioning Ourselves for High Quality Research

  • But we're positioning ourselves to be able to generate much more high quality research.

  • A lot of our aesthetic is to take phenomenology very seriously and find very large effect sizes, so when we point high-powered mainstream neuroscience at it, we're reasonably certain we're going to see something interesting.

Seeking Undeniable Evidence

  • I'm not that interested in a study that barely makes statistical significance threshold.
  • I want something that is undeniable, like pure harmony and pure valence, something really strong.
  • That's what we're working on figuring out how to get - very strong, undeniable evidence for this.

What types of major inflection points in technology do you think would help advance this in a meaningful way?

Andres: The holy grail of technology would be something like EEG plus MEG plus fMRI at the same time. Then you would be able to see all the electrical signals, the magnetic state on the surface of the skull, and the blood flow inside the brain. With those three data points, I suspect we can triangulate much more, in particular things such as the topology of the field.

I don't think we can do that just with EEG, but combining EEG and MEG, then yes, because you have the full picture of the electromagnetic field around the skull. There are a lot of things in math where you can tell what kind of knot a given knot is just by looking at the surface of the knot without looking at the interior. There are interesting mathematical properties like that.

My strong suspicion is you don't actually need to image the entire brain. As long as you have a really high quality understanding of what's happening on the surface, you can infer things about the topology of the interior.

We're working really hard at it, doing psychophysics research, neuroscience research, analyzing datasets, collaborating with academia. I think we are starting to get solid empirical hints, like the data on correlations between various kinds of coherence and well-being. But we want to generate undeniable evidence, not just barely statistically significant results. Combining EEG, MEG and fMRI could be the holy grail, allowing us to infer things about the topology of the brain's electromagnetic field from just the activity on the surface.

Why Current AI Cannot Be Conscious

While we’re talking about technology, I thought you made a very compelling argument as to whether our current AI will achieve consciousness and why it isn’t conscious. I thought that would be an interesting way to round out the show.

Andres: Current Hardware and Consciousness

  • I'm fairly confident current hardware cannot be conscious.
  • Well trivially, everything is conscious because the universe is a gigantic field of consciousness.
  • But there is a difference between what you could call "mind dust", which I think is our computers, versus actual minds.

The Brain vs. Computers

  • The difference between the brain and a computer is that the brain is actually putting qualia together into unified experiences that have top-down, causal, holistic effects.
  • Whereas in a computer, it's 100% bottom-up. A GPU is just looking at local connections, not long-range connections or electromagnetic resonance. The field is not feeding back into low-level operations.
  • As such, it's something that doesn't have the capacity for a large-scale pattern to feed back into what is happening at the low level.
  • Anything you can point at as a large-scale pattern is epiphenomenal, it doesn't have further causal effects over and above what you already know.

Electromagnetic Resonance and Holistic Field Behavior

  • Whereas things like electromagnetic resonance and holistic field behavior, that's a very different type of computational architecture or aesthetic, a different way of thinking about computation.

Creating Conscious Systems in the Future

  • That said, for better or worse, I do think we will be able to create conscious systems in the future, probably as early as a few decades.
  • And I worry a lot about that ethically. There are a lot of things that have to be worked out, such as making sure if we build sentient systems, they are animated by gradients of bliss, that they're actually happy.
  • We don't want a factory farm scenario where we're creating sentient machines and enslaving them for our benefit without taking care of them, which would probably happen by default given incentives and philosophical sophistication and empathy.

Acting Now to Prevent Unethical Scenarios

  • So we have to act now to prevent that scenario.
  • It's why we're trying to get the word out there about raising consciousness.

To summarize, the current way these models are built and computers are configured, they’re just not set up for an AI to be truly conscious. It’s more a simulation of something that appears conscious based on a novel capacity we’re not used to. But it wouldn’t be able to feel and reason and come up with completely adjacent concepts and ideas it hadn’t been exposed to. Am I off?

Andres: Large Language Models and AI: Superhuman Creativity

  • The large language models and AIs that are coming up pretty soon, I do think they will be superhuman in creativity.
  • They will be capable of connecting things that have meaningful relationships that we are missing.
  • I don't think it will be a case where they're bottlenecked on key capabilities that will make them incompetent or anything of the sort.

Insentient Systems Can Be Extremely Dangerous

  • Insentient systems can be extremely dangerous. I am currently thinking AI is actually super dangerous, especially very advanced AI.
  • The AI in five to ten years might be really problematic in some ways.

Lack of Subjective Experience: A Limitation

  • But it doesn't have subjective experience, so there are some things it just doesn't know about and can't answer.
  • For example, there's really nothing meaningful Claude, GPT-3, GPT-4 can tell you about DMT experiences. It can guess, make correlations, talk about how other people talk about DMT.
  • But if you ask "if you go to the chrysanthemum level and do a jhana meditation, what happens?" It just has no idea, because it has no access to those states of consciousness.

A Potential Safeguard and Advantage for Humans

  • To some extent that is a safeguard.
  • There is a wild possible timeline where the way we become smarter than AI is by recruiting DMT states of consciousness for hyper-computation.
  • It's a tall order but it is the sort of thing where we will continue to have an advantage over insentient systems.

AI's Potential in Military Strategy and Diplomacy

  • But for things like military strategy, diplomacy, AI will be really powerful, unfortunately.

Hopefully we won’t need too much military strategy in the future, but I’m not putting my money on it.

Andres: I think the future is going to be glorious beyond our imagination, but the next decades and this century will be tricky to navigate.

I'm fairly confident current computer hardware cannot host unified consciousness. The key difference is the brain puts information together into unified experiences that have top-down, causal, holistic effects, whereas current computers are 100% bottom-up, lacking the capacity for large-scale patterns to feed back into low-level processing. However, I do think we will be able to create conscious systems within decades, and we must proactively work to ensure they are built ethically. In the meantime, the lack of real subjective experience is a limitation for even superhuman AI systems in certain domains.

Wrapping Up

Scott: Andre, I absolutely love what you’re doing. Lots of knowledge today. Maybe you could share a bit more about Qualia if people are interested in following your work.

Andres: Fantastic. We publish at qri.org. You can find our peer-reviewed papers there as well as blog posts, videos, essays, and animation simulations. I also tweet @algekalipso. Google my name and you’ll find it. And I blog at qualiacomputing.com. Those are the main ways you can find more about us.

Scott: I’ll make sure to link all those out. Keep up all the great work, it’s exciting to follow. I’m also going to check out some of those meditations and link those as well.

Andres: Fantastic, beautiful. Thank you so much, it’s been delightful. I appreciate the invite.

Scott: Thank you!