Qualia Research Institute: History & 2021 Strategy

[-]Charlie Steiner5y20

Isn’t it perplexing that we’re trying to reduce the amount of suffering and increase the amount of happiness in the world, yet we don’t have a precise definition for either suffering or happiness?

Not nearly as perplexing as how I just made crepes without a precise definition of what a crepe is. If only there were crepes in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, one of the seminal works I might recommend to someone confronting issues like these.

I know it's a huge thing to ask, but I seriously urge you to rethink your philosophical commitment to finding a precise formal definition of consciousness, etc. Try to do things that look more like "normal" neuroscience of consciousness (in scare quotes because the field is very heterogeneous, but as an example of work that solves interesting problems orthogonal to formally defining consciousness, I like the experimental philosophy presented by Ned Block in this talk: https://youtu.be/6lHHxcxurhQ ).

[-]Michael Edward Johnson5y160

Hi Charlie, I'm glad to point to our announced collaborations with JHU, Harvard, ICL, and some of the other more established centers for neuroscience, as well as our psychophysics toolkit, which you can check out here. I find that many times people operate from cached impressions of what we're doing and in such cases I try to get people to update their cache, as our work does now encompass what most people might call "normal" neuroscience of consciousness and associated markers of legitimacy (as inspired and guided by our theoretical work).

I highly appreciate Wittgenstein's notion of language games as a nigh-universal tool for dissolving confusion. However, I would also suggest an alternate framing: "have you tried solving the problem?" -- has anyone tried to formalize emotional valence before in a way that could yield results if there is a solution? What could a 'solution' here even mean? What would this process look like from the inside? What outputs should we expect to see from the outside? Is there a "fire alarm" for solving this problem? -- In short I think "dissolving confusion" is important for consciousness research, but I don't think that's necessarily the only goal. Rather, we should also look for 'deep structure' to be formalized, much like electromagnetism and chemistry had 'deep structure' to be formalized. I feel skeptics (analytic functionalists) risk premature optimization here -- skepticism isn't a strong position to hold before we've 'actually tried' to find this structure. (I say more about the problems I see with analytic functionalism / eliminativism as positive theories here.)

QRI is predicated on the assumption that, before we give up on systematizing consciousness, we should apply the same core formalism aesthetics that have led to progress in other fields, to consciousness -- i.e. we should 'actually try'. From both inside-view process and outside-view neuroscience outputs, I'm confident what we're doing is strongly worthwhile.

[-]Charlie Steiner5y40

That's good news to me, and I'm sorry for making a sweeping generalization based on your older work. The marker of legitimacy I am particularly interested in is whether your empirical investigations are still useful in the case that consciousness is not at all amenable to simple formalization.

[-]andzuck5y70

Appreciate the crepe joke! My preference is sweet over savory.

On the topic of language, I strongly support Mike's reply which pushes in the direction of finding the 'deep structure' of consciousness. Johannes Kleiner also has written about ways to approach this problem in his paper "Mathematical Models of Consciousness" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.03223.pdf).

To respond to your ask for us to rethink our philosophical commitments... if you were alive before the period table of elements was discovered, would you similarly urge Mendeleev to rethink his commitment to exploring the structure of matter / finding precise definitions for elements like 'gold' and 'iron'? What reasons or evidence would you need to make research into the structure of matter seem worthwhile? What similar reasons or evidence would we need to decide the same for qualia? A priori, why should we expect that qualia does not have deep structure but matter does? Given the information that colors have certain structural relationships (leading to the CIELAB Color Space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space), does that make you more or less confident that there is something real and precise here to be studied?

I haven't watched that talk by Ned Block. Thank you for sharing it and I'll check it out!

[-]Signer5y10

The way I see it, the crux is not in a deep structure being definable - functionalism is perfectly compatible with definitions of experience on the same level of precision and reality as elements. And the research into the physical structures that people associate with consciousness certainly can be worthwhile and it can be used to resolve ethical disagreements in the sense that actual humans would express agreement afterwards. But the stance of QRI seems to be that resulting precise definition would be literally objective as in "new fundamental physics" - I think it should be explicitly clarified whether it's the case.

[-]Charlie Steiner5y10

Neuroscience and philosophy are not physics and chemistry. I don't expect there to be an "atomic theory of color qualia" or anything like it because of a combination of factors like:

Cultural and general interpersonal differences in color perception.

The tendency of evolution to produce complicated, interlinked mechanisms, including in the brain, rather than modular ones.

Examples of brain damage and people with unusual psychology or physiology that have dramatically different color qualia than me.

Animals and artificial systems that use color perception to navigate the world but don't seem to converge to similar ways pf perceiving color.

The evidence of absence of a soul or other homuncular center of perception, which necessitates understanding perception as an emergent phenomenon made of lots of little pieces.

The causal efficacy of color perception (i.e. I don't just see things, I actually do different things depending on what I see) tying colors into all the other complications of the human mind.

Complications that we know about from neuroscience, such as asymmetric local centers of function, and certain individual clusters of neurons being causally related to individual memories, motions, and sensations.

Our experience with artificial neural networks, and how challenging interpreting their weights is.

If we compare this with atoms, atoms do indeed have some local variation in mass, but only within a suspiciously small range. Rules like conservation of mass appear to hold among elements, rather than there being common exceptions. We didn't already know that atoms were emergent phenomena from the interactions of bajillions of pieces. We did not already have a scientific field studying how many of those bajillions of pieces played idiosyncratic and evolutionarily contingent roles. Et c.

[-]Michael Edward Johnson5y80

Some sorts of knowledge about consciousness will necessarily be as messy as the brain is messy, but the core question is whether there's any 'clean substructure' to be discovered about phenomenology itself. Here's what I suggest in Principia Qualia:

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>Brains vs conscious systems:

>There are fundamentally two kinds of knowledge about valence: things that are true specifically in brains like ours, and general principles common to all conscious entities. Almost all of what we know about pain and pleasure is of the first type – essentially, affective neuroscience has been synonymous with making maps of the mammalian brain’s evolved, adaptive affective modules and contingent architectural quirks (“spandrels”).

>This paper attempts to chart a viable course for this second type of research: it’s an attempt toward a general theory of valence, a.k.a. universal, substrate-independent principles that apply equally to and are precisely true in all conscious entities, be they humans, non-human animals, aliens, or conscious artificial intelligence (AI).

>In order to generalize valence research in this way, we need to understand valence research as a subset of qualia research, and qualia research as a problem in information theory and/or physics, rather than neuroscience. Such a generalized approach avoids focusing on contingent facts and instead seeks general principles for how the causal organization of a physical system generates or corresponds to its phenomenology, or how it feels to subjectively be that system. David Chalmers has hypothesized about this in terms of “psychophysical laws” (Chalmers 1995), or translational principles which we could use to derive a system’s qualia, much like we can derive the electromagnetic field generated by some electronic gadget purely from knowledge of the gadget’s internal composition and circuitry.

[-]Charlie Steiner5y20

How is "clean substructure" different in principle from a garden-variety high-level description? Crepes are a thin pancake made with approximately equal parts egg, milk, and flour, potentially with sugar, salt, oil, or small amounts of leavening, spread in a large pan and cooked quickly. This english sentence is radically simpler than a microscopic description of a crepe. As a law of crepeitude, it has many admirable practical qualities, allowing me to make crepes, and to tell which recipes are for crepes and which are not, even if they're slightly different from my description.

A similar high-level description for consciousness might start with "Conscious beings are a lot like humans - they do a lot of information processing, have memories and imaginations and desires, think about the world and make plans, feel emotions like happiness or sadness, and often navigate the world using bodies that are in a complex feedback loop with their central information processor." This english sentence is, again, a lot simpler than a microscopic description of a person. It is, all in all, a remarkable feat of compression.

Of course, I suspect this isn't what you want - you hope that consciousness is obligingly simple in ways that cut out the reliance on human interpretation from the above description, while still being short enough to fit on a napkin. The main way that this sort of thing has been true in physics and chemistry is when humans are noticing some pattern in the world with a simple explanation in terms of underlying essences. The broad lack of such essences in philosophy explains the historical failure of myriad simple and objective theories of humanity, life, the good, etc.

[-]Michael Edward Johnson5y70

Hi Charlie,

To compress a lot of thoughts into a small remark, I think both possibilities (consciousness is like electromagnetism in that it has some deep structure to be formalized, vs consciousness is like elan vital in that it lacks any such deep structure) are live possibilities. What's most interesting to me is doing the work that will give us evidence which of these worlds we live in. There are a lot of threads mentioned in my first comment that I think can generate value/clarity here; in general I'd recommend brainstorming "what would I expect to see if I lived in a world where consciousness does, vs does not, have a crisp substructure?"

[-]Viliam5y20

Not nearly as perplexing as how I just made crepes without a precise definition of what a crepe is.

That is an area where I am more constrained by talent than by funding.

Universal meaning that the theory retains its explanatory power no matter where we are in the universe and no matter what brain architecture an organism has. ↩︎
See Appendix B. ↩︎
Mike Johnson, co-founder of Qualia Research Institute, wrote about this dilemma back in 2015 in “Effective Altruism, and building a better QALY” and we’re excited to see Rethink Priorities pick up the baton in their recent exploration for alternatives to QALYs and DALYs. Yet even these upgraded metrics don’t measure the ground-truth of subjective experience itself. They also don’t comment on the experiences of animals and non-communicative conscious beings. ↩︎
Qualia formalism is the hypothesis that the internal structure of our subjective experience can be represented precisely by mathematics. ↩︎
Other labs do focus on some of these (like Tononi’s lab taking qualia formalism seriously), but to our knowledge, none care about all three. ↩︎

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Qualia Research Institute: History & 2021 Strategy

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Key Points

Why Does Qualia Research Institute Exist?

Qualia Research Institute’s Mission

How We Expect To Make Progress Toward Our Mission

QRI History & Past Work

Core Team Intro

Timeline of QRI

Board of Advisors

Strategic Advisors

How We’ve Used Money So Far

What We’ve Accomplished

QRI Is More Constrained by Funding Than by Talent

What We Would Do With More Funding

Pay Our Existing Team

Expand Our Team

Invest in Compute

Physical Location

2021 Strategy

2021 Research Agenda

Significant Organizational Transformations

Upgrading Organizational Capacity

Increasing Scientific Standards

Emphasizing Clarity

Building Professional QRI Publishing Pipeline

Create a Top-Down Hiring System

Why We Are a Nonprofit Research Group

Fundraising Goals

Much More Room to Grow

The Importance of Understanding Valence

How to Donate to QRI

Additional Gratitude

Appendix A: Timeline of QRI

Appendix B: How Our Research Interfaces with Psychedelic Research