Good catch; there’s plenty that our glossary does not cover yet. This post is at 70 comments now, and I can just say I’m typing as fast as I can!
I pinged our engineer (who has taken the lead on the neuroimaging pipeline work) about details, but as the collaboration hasn’t yet been announced I’ll err on the side of caution in sharing.
To Michael — here’s my attempt to clarify the terms you highlighted:
Neurophysiological models of suffering try to dig into the computational utility and underlying biology of suffering
-> existing theories talk about what emotions ‘do’ for an organism, and what neurochemicals and brain regions seem to be associated with suffering
symmetry
Frank Wilczek calls symmetry ‘change without change’. A limited definition is that it’s a measure of the number of ways you can rotate a picture, and still get the same result. You can rotate a square 90 degrees, 180 degrees, and 270 degrees and get something identical; you can rotate a circle any direction and get something identical. Thus we’d say circles have more rotational symmetries than squares (who have more than rectangles, etc)
harmony
Harmony has been in our vocabulary a long time, but it’s not a ‘crisp’ word. This is why I like to talk about symmetry, rather than harmony — although they more-or-less point in the same direction
dissonance
The combination of multiple frequencies that have a high amount of interaction, but few common patterns. Nails on a chalkboard create a highly dissonant sound; playing the C and C# keys at the same time also creates a relatively dissonant sound
resonance as a proxy for characteristic activity
I’m not sure I can give a fully satisfying definition here that doesn’t just reference CSHW; I’ll think about this one more.
Consonance Dissonance Noise Signature
A way of mathematically calculating how much consonance, dissonance, and noise there is when we add different frequencies together. This is an algorithm developed at QRI by my co-founder, Andrés
self-organizing systems
A system which isn’t designed by some intelligent person, but follows an organizing logic of its own. A beehive or anthill would be a self-organizing system; no one’s in charge, but there’s still something clever going on
Neural Annealing
In November 2019 I released a work speaking of the brain as a self-organizing system. Basically, “when the brain is in an emotionally intense state, change is easier” similar to how when metal heats up and starts to melt, it’s easier to change the shape of the metal
full neuroimaging stack
All the software we need to do an analysis (and specifically, the CSHW analysis), from start to finish
precise physical formalism for consciousness
A perfect theory of consciousness, which could be applied to anything. Basically a “consciousness meter”
STV gives us a rich set of threads to follow for clear neurofeedback targets, which should allow for much more effective closed-loop systems, and I am personally extraordinarily excited about the creation of technologies that allow people to “update toward wholesome”,
Ah yes this is a litttttle bit dense. Basically, one big thing holding back neurotech is we don’t have good biomarkers for well-being. If we design these biomarkers, we can design neurofeedback systems which work better (not sure how familiar you are with neurofeedback)
Good catch; there’s plenty that our glossary does not cover yet. This post is at 70 comments now, and I can just say I’m typing as fast as I can!
I pinged our engineer (who has taken the lead on the neuroimaging pipeline work) about details, but as the collaboration hasn’t yet been announced I’ll err on the side of caution in sharing.
To Michael — here’s my attempt to clarify the terms you highlighted:
Neurophysiological models of suffering try to dig into the computational utility and underlying biology of suffering
-> existing theories talk about what emotions ‘do’ for an organism, and what neurochemicals and brain regions seem to be associated with suffering
symmetry
Frank Wilczek calls symmetry ‘change without change’. A limited definition is that it’s a measure of the number of ways you can rotate a picture, and still get the same result. You can rotate a square 90 degrees, 180 degrees, and 270 degrees and get something identical; you can rotate a circle any direction and get something identical. Thus we’d say circles have more rotational symmetries than squares (who have more than rectangles, etc)
harmony
Harmony has been in our vocabulary a long time, but it’s not a ‘crisp’ word. This is why I like to talk about symmetry, rather than harmony — although they more-or-less point in the same direction
dissonance
The combination of multiple frequencies that have a high amount of interaction, but few common patterns. Nails on a chalkboard create a highly dissonant sound; playing the C and C# keys at the same time also creates a relatively dissonant sound
resonance as a proxy for characteristic activity
I’m not sure I can give a fully satisfying definition here that doesn’t just reference CSHW; I’ll think about this one more.
Consonance Dissonance Noise Signature
A way of mathematically calculating how much consonance, dissonance, and noise there is when we add different frequencies together. This is an algorithm developed at QRI by my co-founder, Andrés
self-organizing systems
A system which isn’t designed by some intelligent person, but follows an organizing logic of its own. A beehive or anthill would be a self-organizing system; no one’s in charge, but there’s still something clever going on
Neural Annealing
In November 2019 I released a work speaking of the brain as a self-organizing system. Basically, “when the brain is in an emotionally intense state, change is easier” similar to how when metal heats up and starts to melt, it’s easier to change the shape of the metal
full neuroimaging stack
All the software we need to do an analysis (and specifically, the CSHW analysis), from start to finish
precise physical formalism for consciousness
A perfect theory of consciousness, which could be applied to anything. Basically a “consciousness meter”
STV gives us a rich set of threads to follow for clear neurofeedback targets, which should allow for much more effective closed-loop systems, and I am personally extraordinarily excited about the creation of technologies that allow people to “update toward wholesome”,
Ah yes this is a litttttle bit dense. Basically, one big thing holding back neurotech is we don’t have good biomarkers for well-being. If we design these biomarkers, we can design neurofeedback systems which work better (not sure how familiar you are with neurofeedback)