I feel like your explanations are skipping a bunch of steps that would help folks understand where you’re coming from. FWIW, here’s how I make sense of STV:
Neuroscience can tell us that some neurons light up when we eat chocolate, but it doesn’t tell us what it is about the delicious experience of chocolate that makes it so wonderful. “This is what sugar looks like” and “this is the location of the reward center” are great descriptions of parts of the process, but they don’t explain why certain patterns of neural activations feel a certain way.
Everyone agrees that clearly, certain activation patterns do feel a certain way. Quite plausibly, this isn’t just a brain thing but more fundamental, and evolution simply recruited the relationship to build RL agents like ourselves. And yet, almost nobody has tried to figure out how exactly the patterns relate to the experiences. Of course, that’s because we struggle with both sides of the equation: on the neural side of the equals-sign, the data is incomplete and noisy; on the experience side, what do we even put to represent “delicious”?
But we have to start somewhere, so we simplify. On the neural side, we look for the simplest kind of signature we can reliably detect in global-scale brain data: symmetries/harmonies across space and time. On the experience side, we collapse everything onto a good/bad axis: valence. Now that’s still a pretty vague hypothesis, but just barely solid enough that we can at least reason about and perhaps even test it.
This seems very arbitrary! Well, collapsing qualia onto a single valence dimension (for now) is relatively uncontroversial, since there are at least a few things that everyone can agree feel fantastic or terrible. But why look for symmetry/harmony/resonance in the brain data, rather than other things like amplitude or spatial distribution? Here it’s worth explaining that you didn’t just pull that idea out of your … uhm, hat, but that experience suggests that all our senses – visual, spatial, temporal, auditory, etc. – are exquisitely attuned to certain kinds of symmetry. This may sound trivial, but the evidence from psychedelic research, intense meditation, psychotherapy etc. suggests that there’s something about it that goes much deeper than just “kaleidoscopes are pretty”. And also, that the hypothetical mathematical object representing one’s brain state is so high-dimensional that a huge class of neural activation patterns will have some kind of symmetry or another, leaving plenty of room for agreement with existing neuroscience. This is what most of your material is about, at least to my understanding.
How compelling this feels (and just feels!) to investigate is something most readers won’t appreciate unless they’ve experienced altered states of consciousness themselves. This is worth acknowledging explicitly, but not condescendingly: “this may be more difficult to relate to if you haven’t tried psychedelics”, rather than “you wouldn’t understand if you’re at a lower developmental stage”.
But also, none of this proves anything yet. People used to think that a fever was the disease, simply because it was the most obvious symptom, so perhaps back then it would have been an obvious leap to claim temperature were fundamental and causal to the qualia of sickness. It’s possible that the symmetry story will turn out to be a dud in the same way, even though it feels very appealing now and is certainly worth investigating.
This is an interesting summary, and was basically what I guessed STV was getting at, but this is a hypothesis, not a theory. The hypothesis is: what if there is content in the symmetry encoded in various brain states?
I don’t understand is how symmetry in brain readings is supposed to really explain valence better than, say, neurons firing brain areas involved in attraction/repulsion. Is the claim that the symmetry is the qualia of valence? How would symmetries and resonance be exempt from the hard problem any more than neuronal activation?
> How compelling this feels (and just feels!) to investigate is something most readers won’t appreciate unless they’ve experienced altered states of consciousness themselves.
Do you think it should be compelling based on a trip? Is that real evidence? I’m not closed to the possibility in principle, but outside view it sounds like psychedelics just give you an attraction to certain shapes and ideas and give you a sense of insight. That might not be totally unrelated to a relevant observation about valence or qualia, but I don’t see any reason to think pschedelics give you more direct access to the nature of our brains.
Thanks Holly! I’m not advocating for STV, I’m just an interested layperson who’s followed QRI’s work for some time and felt frustrated with everyone here furiously talking past one another.
Is the claim that the symmetry is the qualia of valence? How would symmetries and resonance be exempt from the hard problem any more than neuronal activation?
Yep – if I understand it correctly, the reasoning goes something like “there’s nothing obviously special about biological neurons as a physical substrate, so maybe consciousness is fundamental to the universe but only emerges when physical systems interact with each other/themselves in particular ways”. IIT seems to have that flavour, and STV as well. I don’t know if it solves the hard problem per se, but I can see why a fundamental theory is more appealing than just a brain map of reward/aversion “centers” and the like.
Do you think it should be compelling based on a trip? Is that real evidence?
I wanted to be careful, that’s why I tried to emphasize the word “feels” :P
Trips are compelling evidence that the space of possible conscious experiences is vast and unspeakably weird, and that our “normal” consciousness is just what evolution optimized for to help us get through the day. And so in the endeavour of cataloguing, systematizing, and eventually trying to model qualia, I would trust someone who personally appreciates the vastness of this space, and who is rigorous and detailed about its weirdness.
This is dangerous territory, not just epistemically but politically. Drunk and stoned people’s “deep insights” tend to be dumb nonsense, so why should we trust other druggies’ claims? Sadly, academic psychedelics researchers struggle with this public perception, and their solution is to publish only on clinical applications, as if the changes in consciousness were an embarrassing side effect rather than central to the experience. QRI are the only team I know of who don’t implicitly privilege sobriety and instead explicitly talk about the space of possible qualia. That is something I really appreciate.
As for whether symmetries/harmonies in the qualia experienced on trips are a compelling enough reason to look for symmetries/harmonies in brain data – I really don’t know. But I do think gears-level models of qualia would be useful, and since neuroscience is mostly silent on the topic, symmetries are as good a place as any to start ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
It’s also worth noting there are a number of reasons I’m skeptical of the attraction to symmetry. I think it’s reasoning from aesthetics that we have very good and well-understood reasons (not realted to the nature of valence) to hold. And, if the claim is that the resonances are conveying the valence, highly synchronous or symmetrical states hold less information, so I’m skeptical that that would be a way of encoding valence. It’s at best redundant as a way of storing information (at worst its a seizure, where too many neurons are recruited away from doing their job to doing the same thing at once).
Again, not evidence for anything, but seizures can apparently be incredibly blissful, so it all depends. STV proponents would probably say that depending on the subnetworks involved and the particular synchronicities in the firing patterns, it could be a pleasant seizure or an unpleasant one …
They can be blissful or terrifying depending on where in the brain they occur. I thought is was pretty well understood that locality is what determines the experience, not harmonics of the seizure. Even if harmonics have something to do with it, I wouldn’t say that experiences during seizures are evidence in favor of STV.
I really appreciate you putting it like this, and endorse everything you wrote.
I think sometimes researchers can get too close to their topics and collapse many premises and steps together; they sometimes sort of ‘throw away the ladder’ that got them where they are, to paraphrase Wittgenstein. This can make it difficult to communicate to some audiences. My experience on the forum this week suggests this may have happened to me on this topic. I’m grateful for the help the community is offering on filling in the gaps.
I feel like your explanations are skipping a bunch of steps that would help folks understand where you’re coming from. FWIW, here’s how I make sense of STV:
Neuroscience can tell us that some neurons light up when we eat chocolate, but it doesn’t tell us what it is about the delicious experience of chocolate that makes it so wonderful. “This is what sugar looks like” and “this is the location of the reward center” are great descriptions of parts of the process, but they don’t explain why certain patterns of neural activations feel a certain way.
Everyone agrees that clearly, certain activation patterns do feel a certain way. Quite plausibly, this isn’t just a brain thing but more fundamental, and evolution simply recruited the relationship to build RL agents like ourselves. And yet, almost nobody has tried to figure out how exactly the patterns relate to the experiences. Of course, that’s because we struggle with both sides of the equation: on the neural side of the equals-sign, the data is incomplete and noisy; on the experience side, what do we even put to represent “delicious”?
But we have to start somewhere, so we simplify. On the neural side, we look for the simplest kind of signature we can reliably detect in global-scale brain data: symmetries/harmonies across space and time. On the experience side, we collapse everything onto a good/bad axis: valence. Now that’s still a pretty vague hypothesis, but just barely solid enough that we can at least reason about and perhaps even test it.
This seems very arbitrary! Well, collapsing qualia onto a single valence dimension (for now) is relatively uncontroversial, since there are at least a few things that everyone can agree feel fantastic or terrible. But why look for symmetry/harmony/resonance in the brain data, rather than other things like amplitude or spatial distribution? Here it’s worth explaining that you didn’t just pull that idea out of your … uhm, hat, but that experience suggests that all our senses – visual, spatial, temporal, auditory, etc. – are exquisitely attuned to certain kinds of symmetry. This may sound trivial, but the evidence from psychedelic research, intense meditation, psychotherapy etc. suggests that there’s something about it that goes much deeper than just “kaleidoscopes are pretty”. And also, that the hypothetical mathematical object representing one’s brain state is so high-dimensional that a huge class of neural activation patterns will have some kind of symmetry or another, leaving plenty of room for agreement with existing neuroscience. This is what most of your material is about, at least to my understanding.
How compelling this feels (and just feels!) to investigate is something most readers won’t appreciate unless they’ve experienced altered states of consciousness themselves. This is worth acknowledging explicitly, but not condescendingly: “this may be more difficult to relate to if you haven’t tried psychedelics”, rather than “you wouldn’t understand if you’re at a lower developmental stage”.
But also, none of this proves anything yet. People used to think that a fever was the disease, simply because it was the most obvious symptom, so perhaps back then it would have been an obvious leap to claim temperature were fundamental and causal to the qualia of sickness. It’s possible that the symmetry story will turn out to be a dud in the same way, even though it feels very appealing now and is certainly worth investigating.
This is an interesting summary, and was basically what I guessed STV was getting at, but this is a hypothesis, not a theory. The hypothesis is: what if there is content in the symmetry encoded in various brain states?
I don’t understand is how symmetry in brain readings is supposed to really explain valence better than, say, neurons firing brain areas involved in attraction/repulsion. Is the claim that the symmetry is the qualia of valence? How would symmetries and resonance be exempt from the hard problem any more than neuronal activation?
> How compelling this feels (and just feels!) to investigate is something most readers won’t appreciate unless they’ve experienced altered states of consciousness themselves.
Do you think it should be compelling based on a trip? Is that real evidence? I’m not closed to the possibility in principle, but outside view it sounds like psychedelics just give you an attraction to certain shapes and ideas and give you a sense of insight. That might not be totally unrelated to a relevant observation about valence or qualia, but I don’t see any reason to think pschedelics give you more direct access to the nature of our brains.
Thanks Holly! I’m not advocating for STV, I’m just an interested layperson who’s followed QRI’s work for some time and felt frustrated with everyone here furiously talking past one another.
Yep – if I understand it correctly, the reasoning goes something like “there’s nothing obviously special about biological neurons as a physical substrate, so maybe consciousness is fundamental to the universe but only emerges when physical systems interact with each other/themselves in particular ways”. IIT seems to have that flavour, and STV as well. I don’t know if it solves the hard problem per se, but I can see why a fundamental theory is more appealing than just a brain map of reward/aversion “centers” and the like.
I wanted to be careful, that’s why I tried to emphasize the word “feels” :P
Trips are compelling evidence that the space of possible conscious experiences is vast and unspeakably weird, and that our “normal” consciousness is just what evolution optimized for to help us get through the day. And so in the endeavour of cataloguing, systematizing, and eventually trying to model qualia, I would trust someone who personally appreciates the vastness of this space, and who is rigorous and detailed about its weirdness.
This is dangerous territory, not just epistemically but politically. Drunk and stoned people’s “deep insights” tend to be dumb nonsense, so why should we trust other druggies’ claims? Sadly, academic psychedelics researchers struggle with this public perception, and their solution is to publish only on clinical applications, as if the changes in consciousness were an embarrassing side effect rather than central to the experience. QRI are the only team I know of who don’t implicitly privilege sobriety and instead explicitly talk about the space of possible qualia. That is something I really appreciate.
As for whether symmetries/harmonies in the qualia experienced on trips are a compelling enough reason to look for symmetries/harmonies in brain data – I really don’t know. But I do think gears-level models of qualia would be useful, and since neuroscience is mostly silent on the topic, symmetries are as good a place as any to start ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
It’s also worth noting there are a number of reasons I’m skeptical of the attraction to symmetry. I think it’s reasoning from aesthetics that we have very good and well-understood reasons (not realted to the nature of valence) to hold. And, if the claim is that the resonances are conveying the valence, highly synchronous or symmetrical states hold less information, so I’m skeptical that that would be a way of encoding valence. It’s at best redundant as a way of storing information (at worst its a seizure, where too many neurons are recruited away from doing their job to doing the same thing at once).
Again, not evidence for anything, but seizures can apparently be incredibly blissful, so it all depends. STV proponents would probably say that depending on the subnetworks involved and the particular synchronicities in the firing patterns, it could be a pleasant seizure or an unpleasant one …
They can be blissful or terrifying depending on where in the brain they occur. I thought is was pretty well understood that locality is what determines the experience, not harmonics of the seizure. Even if harmonics have something to do with it, I wouldn’t say that experiences during seizures are evidence in favor of STV.
I really appreciate you putting it like this, and endorse everything you wrote.
I think sometimes researchers can get too close to their topics and collapse many premises and steps together; they sometimes sort of ‘throw away the ladder’ that got them where they are, to paraphrase Wittgenstein. This can make it difficult to communicate to some audiences. My experience on the forum this week suggests this may have happened to me on this topic. I’m grateful for the help the community is offering on filling in the gaps.