Building a Science of Consciousness

In this episode, we discuss the idea of developing a "psychedelic language" based on QRI paradigms and recent experience reports. We suggest that a fruitful strategy for pointing at a whole family of psychedelic effects comes in the form of "field operators" that change the qualitative properties of our experiential fields. We provide a detailed description of what we call the "world-sheet" of experience and how it encodes emotional and semantic content in its very structure.

In this episode, we explore the difference between happiness and meaning, and why so many people believe that meaning is better than happiness. We discuss the concept of "the tyranny of the intentional object", which refers to the tendency for the mind to believe that what it wants is semantically meaningful experiences. In reality, what we want under the surface is to avoid negative valence and achieve sustainable positive valence states of consciousness. We explain how evolution has "hooked us" on particular sources of pleasure in such a way that this is not introspectively accessible to us, and how this often results in us failing to recognize our own addictive tendencies. We also provide our current thoughts on the nature of meaning, explaining that it is made of "felt-senses" that have particular properties, such as high levels of intention, coherence of attention field lines, and a high potential to affect valence. We caution against meaning abuse, and advise listeners to take advantage of opportunities for high levels of meaning, but not to rely on them and think they are universal.

In this episode, we discuss some states of consciousness in which the individual has more control over the contents of their experience. We explore the idea of having an "experience editor" which would enable more conscious exploration of our possible states. We also consider the implications of knowing everything about our world-simulation, and how this knowledge does not have to lead to boredom.

In this episode, we take a serious look at the question of why there is something rather than nothing. We explore the idea of Zero Ontology, which postulates that the multiverse is implied by the preservation of "zero information". In order to understand Zero Ontology, we need to do some conceptual groundwork. We walk the listener through several concepts that make the question go from "impossible to answer" or even "meaningless" to something that at least conceivably seems possible to solve.

In this episode, we explore the idea that there are many undiscovered states of consciousness that are unique and irreducible. We discuss how this framework can help us understand unique scents, and how the receptor affinity profiles of drugs, drug cocktails, and drug schedules can give rise to unique states of mind. We also reflect on how a productive mindset is likely to be High Entropy Alloy-like because it requires the careful balance between many different facets of the mind.

In this episode, we explore sleep paralysis and some of the strange experiences that can occur during this state. We also share tips for how to get out of a sleep paralysis if you find yourself trapped in one.

In this episode, we explore the universal plot of reality, which is the highest level of narrative that determines what is "relevant to the plot" at any given point in time. We discuss how this framework allows us to re-interpret and unify all previous "scales of moral/conceptual development". In turn, it makes solving disagreements in a principled way possible.

In this episode, we explore how graph analysis can be used to control the spread of contagious diseases. We discuss the difference between the aesthetic of pure math vs. applied statistics when it comes to making sense of graphs, and how this can be applied to identifying people with a high centrality in social networks. We also talk about the Klout score, and how it can be used to prioritize who to quarantine or vaccinate first. Finally, we explore the network properties that made the plague spread so slowly in the Middle Ages, and how this can be applied to other planets with similar conditions.

In this episode, we explore the question of why DMT feels so real. We explain that it has to do with the way that DMT alters our senses and emotions, as well as our ability to organize models of reality. We also discuss the fact that DMT can give us powerful hallucinations in every modality, which can make it seem like we are experiencing a completely different reality.

What would it be like to have a scent-based medium of thought, with grammar, generative syntax, clauses, subclauses, field geometry, and intentionality? How do we go about exploring the full state-space of scents (or any other qualia variety)?