MikeJohnson

Karma: 636

MikeJohnson 1 Jun 2020 10:05 UTC
31 points
1 ∶ 0
on: New book — “Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications”
Congratulations on the book! I think long works are surprisingly difficult and valuable (both to author and reader) and I’m really happy to see this.
My intuition on why there’s little discussion of core values is a combination of “a certain value system [is] tacitly assumed” and “we avoid discussing it because … discussing values is considered uncooperative.” To wit, most people in this sphere are computationalists, and the people here who have thought the most about this realize that computationalism inherently denies the possibility of any ‘satisfyingly objective’ definition of core values (and suffering). Thus it’s seen as a bit of a faux pas to dig at this—the tacit assumption is, the more digging that is done, the less ground for cooperation there will be. (I believe this stance is unnecessarily cynical about the possibility of a formalism.)
I look forward to digging into the book. From a skim, I would just say I strongly agree about the badness of extreme suffering; when times are good we often forget just how bad things can be. A couple quick questions in the meantime:
- If you could change peoples’ minds on one thing, what would it be? I.e. what do you find the most frustrating/pernicious/widespread mistake on this topic?
- One intuition pump I like to use is: ‘if you were given 10 billion dollars and 10 years to move your field forward, how precisely would you allocate it, and what do you think you could achieve at the end?’

MikeJohnson 26 Jan 2021 9:06 UTC
26 points
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in reply to: kokotajlod’s comment on: Qualia Research Institute: History & 2021 Strategy
Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the remarks! Prioritization reasoning can get complicated, but to your first concern:

Is emotional valence a particularly confused and particularly high-leverage topic, and one that might plausibly be particularly conductive getting clarity on? I think it would be hard to argue in the negative on the first two questions. Resolving the third question might be harder, but I’d point to our outputs and increasing momentum. I.e. one can levy your skepticism on literally any cause, and I think we hold up excellently in a relative sense. We may have to jump to the object-level to say more.

To your second concern, I think a lot about AI and ‘order of operations’. Could we postulate that some future superintelligence might be better equipped to research consciousness than we mere mortals? Certainly. But might there be path-dependencies here such that the best futures happen if we gain more clarity on consciousness, emotional valence, the human nervous system, the nature of human preferences, and so on, before we reach certain critical thresholds in superintelligence development and capacity? Also — certainly.

Widening the lens a bit, qualia research is many things, and one of these things is an investment in the human-improvement ecosystem, which I think is a lot harder to invest effectively in (yet also arguably more default-safe) than the AI improvement ecosystem. Another ‘thing’ qualia research can be thought of as being is an investment in Schelling point exploration, and this is a particularly valuable thing for AI coordination.

I’m confident that, even if we grant that the majority of humanity’s future trajectory will be determined by AGI trajectory — which seems plausible to me — I think it’s also reasonable to argue that qualia research is one of the highest-leverage areas for positively influencing AGI trajectory and/or the overall AGI safety landscape.

MikeJohnson 23 May 2018 14:49 UTC
21 points
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on: Ineffective entrepreneurship: post-mortem of Hippo, the happiness app that never quite was
I admire many things about this story, not least being your willingness to try & fail, and your brutal honesty in sharing what lessons you learned (or didn’t learn).

There are many bad things about silicon valley, but one thing I think it gets right is giving partial credit for failed moonshots. Thank you for Really Trying to make this happen.

MikeJohnson 5 Jul 2022 11:27 UTC
17 points
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on: The Future Might Not Be So Great.
As a small comment, I believe discussions of consciousness and moral value tend to downplay the possibility that most consciousness may arise outside of what we consider the biological ecosystem.

It feels a bit silly to ask “what does it feel like to be a black hole, or a quasar, or the Big Bang,” but I believe a proper theory of consciousness should have answers to these questions.

We don’t have that proper theory. But I think we can all agree that these megaphenomena involve a great deal of matter/negentropy and plausibly some interesting self-organized microstructure- though that’s purely conjecture. If we’re charting out EV, let’s keep the truly big numbers in mind (even if we don’t know how to count them yet).

MikeJohnson 20 Nov 2019 0:09 UTC
17 points
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in reply to: Buck’s comment on: I’m Buck Shlegeris, I do research and outreach at MIRI, AMA
QRI is tackling a very difficult problem, as is MIRI. It took many, many years for MIRI to gather external markers of legitimacy. My inside view is that QRI is on the path of gaining said markers; for people paying attention to what we’re doing, I think there’s enough of a vector right now to judge us positively. I think these markers will be obvious from the ‘outside view’ within a short number of years.
But even without these markers, I’d poke at your position from a couple angles:
I. Object-level criticism is best
First, I don’t see evidence you’ve engaged with our work beyond very simple pattern-matching. You note that “I also think that I’m somewhat qualified to assess QRI’s work (as someone who’s spent ~100 paid hours thinking about philosophy of mind in the last few years), and when I look at it, I think it looks pretty crankish and wrong.” But *what* looks wrong? Obviously doing something new will pattern-match to crankish, regardless of whether it is crankish, so in terms of your rationale-as-stated, I don’t put too much stock in your pattern detection (and perhaps you shouldn’t either). If we want to avoid accidentally falling into (1) ‘negative-sum status attack’ interactions, and/or (2) hypercriticism of any fundamentally new thing, neither of which is good for QRI, for MIRI, or for community epistemology, object-level criticisms (and having calibrated distaste for low-information criticisms) seem pretty necessary.
Also, we do a lot more things than just philosophy, and we try to keep our assumptions about the Symmetry Theory of Valence separate from our neuroscience—STV can be wrong and our neuroscience can still be correct/useful. That said, empirically the neuroscience often does ‘lead back to’ STV.
Some things I’d offer for critique:
https://opentheory.net/2018/08/a-future-for-neuroscience/#
https://opentheory.net/2018/12/the-neuroscience-of-meditation/
https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/research-lineages
(you can also watch our introductory video for context, and perhaps a ‘marker of legitimacy’, although it makes very few claims https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HetKzjOJoy8 )
I’d also suggest that the current state of philosophy, and especially philosophy of mind and ethics, is very dismal. I give my causal reasons for this here: https://opentheory.net/2017/10/rescuing-philosophy/ - I’m not sure if you’re anchored to existing theories in philosophy of mind being reasonable or not.

II. What’s the alternative?
If there’s one piece I would suggest engaging with, it’s my post arguing against functionalism. I think your comments presuppose functionalism is reasonable and/or the only possible approach, and the efforts QRI is putting into building an alternative are certainly wasted. I strongly disagree with this; as I noted in my Facebook reply,
>Philosophically speaking, people put forth analytic functionalism as a theory of consciousness (and implicitly a theory of valence?), but I don’t think it works *qua* a theory of consciousness (or ethics or value or valence), as I lay out here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/.../why-i-think-the...-- This is more-or-less an answer to some of Brian Tomasik’s (very courageous) work, and to sum up my understanding I don’t think anyone has made or seems likely to make ‘near mode’ progress, e.g. especially of the sort that would be helpful for AI safety, under the assumption of analytic functionalism.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FfJ4rMTJAB3tnY5De/why-i-think-the-foundational-research-institute-should#6Lrwqcdx86DJ9sXmw
----------
I always find in-person interactions more amicable & high-bandwidth—I’ll be back in the Bay early December, so if you want to give this piece a careful read and sit down to discuss it I’d be glad to join you. I think it could have significant implications for some of MIRI’s work.

MikeJohnson 19 Nov 2019 8:52 UTC
17 points
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in reply to: Buck’s comment on: I’m Buck Shlegeris, I do research and outreach at MIRI, AMA
Buck- for an internal counterpoint you may want to discuss QRI’s research with Vaniver. We had a good chat about what we’re doing at the Boston SSC meetup, and Romeo attended a MIRI retreat earlier in the summer and had some good conversations with him there also.
To put a bit of a point on this, I find the “crank philosophy” frame a bit questionable if you’re using only thin-slice outside view and not following what we’re doing. Probably, one could use similar heuristics to pattern-match MIRI as “crank philosophy” also (probably, many people have already done exactly this to MIRI, unfortunately).

MikeJohnson 8 Sep 2021 7:59 UTC
16 points
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in reply to: Holly_Elmore’s comment on: A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
Hi all, I messaged some with Holly a bit about this, and what she shared was very helpful. I think a core part of what happened was a mismatch of expectations: I originally wrote this content for my blog and QRI’s website, and the tone and terminology was geared toward “home team content”, not “away team content”. Some people found both the confidence and somewhat dense terminology offputting, and I think that’s reasonable of them to raise questions. As a takeaway, I‘ve updated that crossposting involves some pitfalls and intend to do things differently next time.

MikeJohnson 8 Sep 2021 16:16 UTC
15 points
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in reply to: Abby Hoskin’s comment on: A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
Hi Abby, thanks for the questions. I have direct answers to 2,3,4, and indirect answers to 1 and 5.
1a. Speaking of the general case, we expect network control theory to be a useful frame for approaching questions of why certain sorts of activity in certain regions of the brain are particularly relevant for valence. (A simple story: hedonic centers of the brain act as ‘tuning knobs’ toward or away from global harmony. This would imply they don’t intrinsically create pleasure and suffering, merely facilitate these states.) This paper from the Bassett lab is the best intro I know of to this;
1b. Speaking again of the general case, asynchronous firing isn’t exactly identical to the sort of dissonance we’d identify as giving rise to suffering: asynchronous firing could be framed as in uncorrelated firing, or ‘non-interacting frequency regimes’. There’s a really cool paper asserting that the golden mean is the optimal frequency ratio for non-interaction, and some applications to EEG work, in case you’re curious. What we’re more interested in is frequency combinations that are highly interacting, and lacking a common basis set. An example would be playing the C and C# keys on a piano. This lens borrows more from music theory and acoustics (e.g. Helmholtz, Sethares) than traditional neuroscience although it lines up with some work by e.g. Buzsáki (Rhythms of the Brain); Friston has also done some cool work here on frequencies, communication, and birdsong, although I’d have to find the reference.
1c. Speaking again of the general case, naively I’d expect dissonance somewhere in the brain to induce dissonance elsewhere in the brain. I‘d have to think about what reference I could point to here as I don’t know if you’ll share this intuition, but a simple analogy would be if many people are walking in a line, if someone trips, more people might trip; chaos begets chaos.
1d. Speaking, finally, of the specific case, I admit I have only a general sense of the structure of the brain networks in question and I’m hesitant to put my foot in my mouth by giving you an answer I have little confidence in. I’d probably punt to the general case, and say if there’s dissonance between these two regions, depending on the network control theory involved, it could be caused by dissonance elsewhere in the brain, and/or it could spread to elsewhere in the brain: i.e. it could be both cause and effect.
2&3. The harmonic analysis we’re most interested in depends on accurately modeling the active harmonics (eigenmodes) of the brain. EEG doesn’t directly model eigenmodes; to infer eigenmodes we’d need fairly accurate source localization. It could be there are alternative ways to test STV without modeling brain eigenmodes, and that EEG could give us. I hope that’s the case, and I hope we find it, since EEG is certainly a lot easier to work with than fMRI.
I.e. we’re definitely not intrinsically tied to source localization, but currently we just don’t see a way to get clean enough abstractions upon which we could compute consonance/dissonance/noise without source localization.
4. Usually we can, and usually it’s much better than trying to measure it with some brain scanner! The rationale for pursuing this line of research is that existing biomarkers for mood and well-being are pretty coarse. If we can design a better biomarker, it’ll be useful for e.g. neurotech wearables. If your iPhone can directly measure how happy you are, you can chart that, correlate it with things, and all sorts of things. “What you can measure, you can manage.” It could also lead to novel therapies and other technologies, and that’s probably what I’m most viscerally excited about. There are also more ‘sci-fi’ applications such as using this to infer the experience of artificial sentience.
5. This question is definitely above my pay grade; I take my special edge here to be helping build a formal theory and more accurate biomarkers for suffering, rather than public policy (e.g. Michael D. Plant‘s turf). I do suspect however that some of the knowledge gained from better biomarkers could help inform emotional wellness best practices, and these best practices could be used by everyone, not just people getting scanned. I also think some therapies that might arise out of having better biomarkers could heal some sorts of trauma more-or-less permanently, so the scanning would just need to be a one-time-thing, not continuous. But this gets into the weeds of implementation pretty quickly.

MikeJohnson 28 Jan 2021 7:13 UTC
14 points
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in reply to: kokotajlod’s comment on: Qualia Research Institute: History & 2021 Strategy
Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the reply! I am a bit surprised at this:

Getting more clarity on emotional valence does not seem particularly high-leverage to me. What’s the argument that it is?

The quippy version is that, if we’re EAs trying to maximize utility, and we don’t have a good understanding of what utility is, more clarity on such concepts seems obviously insanely high-leverage. I’ve written about specific relevant to FAI here: https://opentheory.net/2015/09/fai_and_valence/ Relevance to building a better QALY here: https://opentheory.net/2015/06/effective-altruism-and-building-a-better-qaly/ And I discuss object-level considerations on how better understanding of emotional valence could lead to novel therapies for well-being here: https://opentheory.net/2018/08/a-future-for-neuroscience/ https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything/ On mobile, pardon the formatting.

Your points about sufficiently advanced AIs obsoleting human philosophers are well-taken, though I would touch back on my concern that we won’t have particular clarity on philosophical path-dependencies in AI development without doing some of the initial work ourselves, and these questions could end up being incredibly significant for our long-term trajectory — I gave a talk about this for MCS that I’ll try to get transcribed (in the meantime I can share my slides if you’re interested). I’d also be curious to flip your criticism and ping your models for a positive model for directing EA donations — is the implication that there are no good places to donate to, or that narrow-sense AI safety is the only useful place for donations? What do you think the highest-leverage questions to work on are? And how big are your ‘metaphysical uncertainty error bars’? What sorts of work would shrink these bars?

MikeJohnson 19 Nov 2019 8:22 UTC
14 points
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in reply to: Buck’s comment on: I’m Buck Shlegeris, I do research and outreach at MIRI, AMA
For a fuller context, here is my reply to Buck’s skepticism about the 80% number during our back-and-forth on Facebook—as a specific comment, the number is loosely held, more of a conversation-starter than anything else. As a general comment I’m skeptical of publicly passing judgment on my judgment based on one offhand (and unanswered- it was not engaged with) comment on Facebook. Happy to discuss details in a context we’ll actually talk to each other. :)
--------------my reply from the Facebook thread a few weeks back--------------
I think the probability question is an interesting one—one frame is asking what is the leading alternative to STV?
At its core, STV assumes that if we have a mathematical representation of an experience, the symmetry of this object will correspond to how pleasant the experience is. The latest addition to this (what we’re calling ‘CDNS’) assumes that consonance under Selen Atasoy’s harmonic analysis of brain activity (connectome-specific harmonic waves, CSHW) is a good proxy for this in humans. This makes relatively clear predictions across all human states and could fairly easily be extended to non-human animals, including insects (anything we can infer a connectome for, and the energy distribution for the harmonics of the connectome). So generally speaking we should be able to gather a clear signal as to whether the evidence points this way or not (pending resources to gather this data- we’re on a shoestring budget).
Empirically speaking, the competition doesn’t seem very strong. As I understand it, currently the gold standard for estimating self-reports of emotional valence via fMRI uses regional activity correlations, and explains ~16% of the variance. Based on informal internal estimations looking at coherence within EEG bands during peak states, I’d expect us to do muuuuch better.
Philosophically speaking, people put forth analytic functionalism as a theory of consciousness (and implicitly a theory of valence?), but I don’t think it works *qua* a theory of consciousness (or ethics or value or valence), as I lay out here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/.../why-i-think-the...-- This is more-or-less an answer to some of Brian Tomasik’s (very courageous) work, and to sum up my understanding I don’t think anyone has made or seems likely to make ‘near mode’ progress, e.g. especially of the sort that would be helpful for AI safety, under the assumption of analytic functionalism.
So in short, I think STV is perhaps the only option that is well-enough laid out, philosophically and empirically, to even be tested, to even be falsifiable. That doesn’t mean it’s true, but my prior is it’s ridiculously worthwhile to try to falsify, and it seems to me a massive failure of the EA and x-risk scene that resources are not being shifted toward this sort of inquiry. The 80% I gave was perhaps a bit glib, but to dig a little, I’d say I’d give at least an 80% chance of ‘Qualia Formalism’ being true, and given that, a 95% chance of STV being true, and a 70% chance of CDNS+CSHW being a good proxy for the mathematical symmetry of human experiences.
An obvious thing we’re lacking is resources; a non-obvious thing we’re lacking is good critics. If you find me too confident I’d be glad to hear why. :)
Resources:
Principia Qualia: https://opentheory.net/PrincipiaQualia.pdf(exploratory arguments for formalism and STV laid out)
Against Functionalism: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/.../why-i-think-the...
(an evaluation of what analytic functionalism actually gives us)
Quantifying Bliss: https://qualiacomputing.com/.../quantifying-bliss-talk.../
(Andres Gomez Emilsson’s combination of STV plus Selen Atasoy’s CSHW, which forms the new synthesis we’re working from)
A Future for Neuroscience: https://opentheory.net/2018/08/a-future-for-neuroscience/#
(more on CSHW)
Happy to chat more in-depth about details.

MikeJohnson 7 Sep 2021 23:39 UTC
13 points
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in reply to: MichaelPlant’s comment on: A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
Hi Michael, I appreciate the kind effortpost, as per usual. I’ll do my best to answer.
1. This is a very important question. To restate it in several ways: what kind of thing is suffering? What kind of question is ‘what is suffering’? What would a philosophically satisfying definition of suffering look like? How would we know if we saw it? Why does QRI think existing theories of suffering are lacking? Is an answer to this question a matter of defining some essence, or defining causal conditions, or something else?
Our intent is to define phenomenological valence in a fully formal way, with the template being physics: we wish to develop our models such that we can speak of pain and pleasure with all the clarity, precision, and rigor as we currently describe photons and quarks and fields.
This may sound odd, but physics is a grand success story of formalization, and we essentially wish to apply the things that worked in physics, to phenomenology. Importantly, physics has a strong tradition of using symmetry considerations to inform theory. STV borrows squarely from this tradition (see e.g. my write up on Emmy Noether).
Valence is subjective as you note, but that doesn’t mean it’s arbitrary; there are deep patterns in which conditions and sensations feel good, and which feel bad. We think it’s possible to create a formal system for the subjective. Valence and STV are essentially the pilot project for this system. Others such as James and Husserl have tried to make phenomenological systems, but we believe they didn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle. I’d offer our lineages page for what we identify as ‘the pieces of the puzzle’; these are the shoulders we’re standing on to build our framework.
2. I see the question. Also, thank you for your work on the Happier Lives Institute; we may not interact frequently but I really like what you’re doing.
The significance of a fully rigorous theory of valence might not be fully apparent, even to the people working on it. Faraday and Maxwell formalized electromagnetism; they likely did not foresee theIr theory being used to build the iPhone. However, I suspect that they had deep intuitions that there’s something deeply useful in understanding the structure of nature, and perhaps they wouldn’t be as surprised as their contemporaries. We also hold intuitions as to the applications of a full theory of valence.
The simplest would be, it would unlock novel psychological and psychiatric diagnostics. If there is some difficult-to-diagnose nerve pain, or long covid type bodily suffering, or some emotional disturbance that is difficult to verbalize, well, this is directly measurable in principle with STV. This wouldn’t replace economics and psychology, as you say, but it would augment them.
Longer term, I’m reminded of the (adapted) phrase, “what you can measure, you can manage.” If you can reliably measure suffering, you can better design novel interventions for reducing it. I could see a validated STV as the heart of a revolution in psychiatry, and some of our work (Neural Annealing, Wireheading Done Right) are aimed at possible shapes this might take.
3. Aha, an easy question :) I’d point you toward our web glossary.
To your question, “Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I really not sure what it could even mean to represent consciousness/ valence as a mathematic shape“ — this is perhaps an overly-fancy way of saying that we believe consciousness is precisely formalizable. The speed of light is precisely formalizable; the UK tax rate is precisely formalizable; the waveform of an mp3 is precisely formalizable, and all of these formalizations can be said to be different ‘mathematical shapes’. To say something does not have a ‘mathematical shape’ is to say it defies formal analysis.
Thanks again for your clear and helpful questions.

MikeJohnson 8 Sep 2021 13:39 UTC
12 points
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in reply to: Abby Hoskin’s comment on: A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
Hi Abby,
I feel we’ve been in some sense talking past each other from the start. I think I bear some of the responsibility for that, based on how my post was written (originally for my blog, and more as a summary than an explanation).
I’m sorry for your frustration. I can only say I’m not intentionally trying to frustrate you, but that we appear to have very different styles of thinking and writing and this may have caused some friction, and I have been answering object-level questions from the community as best I can.

MikeJohnson 8 Sep 2021 1:04 UTC
12 points
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on: A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
Just a quick comment in terms of comment flow: there’s been a large amount of editing of the top comment, and some of the replies that have been posted may not seem to follow the logic of the comment they‘re attached to. If there are edits to a comment that you wish me to address, I’d be glad if you made a new comment. (If you don’t, I don’t fault you but I may not address the edit.)

MikeJohnson 8 Sep 2021 13:19 UTC
11 points
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in reply to: SamuelKnoche’s comment on: A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
Hi Samuel,
I’d say there’s at least some diversity of views on these topics within QRI. When I introduced STV in PQ, I very intentionally did not frame it as a moral hypothesis. If we’re doing research, best to keep the descriptive and the normative as separate as possible. If STV is true it may make certain normative frames easier to formulate, but STV itself is not a theory of morality or ethics.
One way to put this is that when I wear my philosopher’s hat, I’m most concerned about understanding what the ‘natural kinds’ (in Plato’s terms) of qualia are. If valence is a natural kind (similar to how a photon or electromagnetism are natural kinds), that’s important knowledge about the structure of reality. My sense is that ‘understanding what reality’s natural kinds are’ is prior to ethics: first figure out what is real, and then everything else (such as ethics and metaethics) becomes easier.
In terms of specific ethical frames, we do count among QRI some deeply committed hedonistic utilitarians. I see deep value in that frame although I would categorize myself as closer to a virtue ethicist.

MikeJohnson 8 Sep 2021 5:31 UTC
11 points
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in reply to: Holly_Elmore’s comment on: A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
Andrés’s STV presentation to Imperial College London’s psychedelics research group is probably the best public resource I can point to on this right now. I can say after these interactions it’s much more clear that people hearing these claims are less interested in the detailed structure of the philosophical argument, and more in the evidence, and in a certain form of evidence. I think this is very reasonable and it’s something we’re finally in a position to work on directly: we spent the last ~year building the technical capacity to do the sorts of studies we believe will either falsify or directly support STV.

MikeJohnson 7 Sep 2021 22:37 UTC
11 points
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
Hi Linch, that’s very well put. I would also add a third possibility (c), which is “is STV false but generative.” — I explore this a little here, with the core thesis summarized in this graphic:
I.e., STV could be false in a metaphysical sense, but insofar as the brain is a harmonic computer (a strong reframe of CSHW), it could be performing harmonic gradient descent. Fully expanded, there would be four cases:
STV true, STHR true
STV true, STHR false
STV false, STHR true
STV false, STHR false
Of course, ‘true and false’ are easier to navigate if we can speak of absolutes; STHR is a model, and ‘all models are wrong; some are useful.’

MikeJohnson 7 Sep 2021 8:29 UTC
11 points
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in reply to: Abby Hoskin’s comment on: A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
Hi Abby, to give a little more color on the data: we’re very interested in CSHW as it gives us a way to infer harmonic structure from fMRI, which we’re optimistic is a significant factor in brain self-organization. (This is still a live hypothesis, not established fact; Atasoy is still proving her paradigm, but we really like it.)
We expect this structure to be highly correlated with global valence, and to show strong signatures of symmetry/harmony during high-valence states. The question we’ve been struggling with as we’ve been building this hypothesis is “what is a signature of symmetry/harmony?” — there’s a bit of research from Stanford (Chon) here on quantifying consonance in complex waveforms and some cool music theory based on Helmholz’s work, but this appears to be an unsolved problem. Our “CDNS” approach basically looks at pairwise relationships between harmonics to quantify the degree to which they’re in consonance or dissonance with each other. We’re at the stage here where we have the algorithm, but need to validate it on audio samples first before applying it too confidently to the brain.
There’s also a question of what datasets are ideal for the sort of thing we’re interested in. Extreme valence datasets are probably the most promising, states of extreme pleasure or extreme suffering. We prefer datasets involving extreme pleasure, for two reasons:
(1) We viscerally feel better analyzing this sort of data than states of extreme suffering;
(2) fMRI’s time resolution is such that the best results will come from mental states with high structural stability. We expect this structural stability to be much higher during pleasure than suffering.
As such we’ve been focusing on collecting data from meditative jhana states, and from MDMA states. There might be other states that involve reliable good emotion that we can study, but these are the best we’ve found conceptually so far.
Lastly, there’s been the issue of neuroimaging pipelines and CSHW. Atasoy‘s work is not open source, so we had to reimplement her core logic (big thanks to Patrick here) and we ended up collaborating with an external group on a project to combine this core logic with a neuroimaging packaging system. I can’t share all the details here as our partner doesn’t want to be public about their involvement yet but this is thankfully wrapping up soon.
I wish we had a bunch of deeply analyzed data we could send you in direct support of STV! And I agree with you that is the ideal and you’re correct to ask for it. Sadly we don’t at this point, but I’m glad to say a lot of the preliminaries have been now taken care of and things are moving. I hope my various comments here haven’t come across as disrespectful (and I sincerely apologize if they have- not my intention but if that’s been your interpretation I accept it, sorry!); there’s just a lot of high-context stuff here that’s hard to package up into something that’s neat and tidy, and overall what clarity we’ve been able to find on this topic has been very hard-won.

MikeJohnson 8 Sep 2021 5:21 UTC
10 points
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in reply to: Holly_Elmore’s comment on: A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
Hi Holly, I’d say the format of my argument there would be enumeration of claims, not e.g. trying to create a syllogism. I’ll try to expand and restate those claims here:
A very important piece of this is assuming there exists a formal structure (formalism) to consciousness. If this is true, STV becomes a lot more probable. If it isn’t, STV can’t be the case.
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is the most famous framework for determining the formal structure to an experience. It does so by looking at the causal relationships between components of a system; the more a system’s parts demonstrate ‘integration’ (which is a technical, mathematical term that tries to define how much a system’s parts interact with its other parts), the more conscious the system is.
I didn’t make IIT, I don’t know if it’s true, and I actually suspect it might not be true (I devoted a section of Principia Qualia to explaining IIT, and another section to critiques of IIT). But it’s a great example of an attempt to formalize phenomenology, and I think the project or overall frame of IIT (the idea of consciousness being the sort of thing that one can apply formal mathematics to) is correct even if its implementation (integration) isn’t.
You can think of IIT as a program. Put in the details of how a system (such as a brain) is put together, and it gives you some math that tells you what the system is feeling.
You can think of STV as a way to analyze this math. STV makes a big jump in that it assumes the symmetry of this mathematical object corresponds to how pleasurable the experience it represents is. This is a huge, huge, huge jump, and cannot be arrived at by deduction; none of my premeses force this conclusion. We can call it an educated guess. But, it is my best educated guess after thinking about this topic for about 7 years before posting my theory. I can say I’m fully confident the problem is super important and I’m optimistic this guess is correct, for many reasons, but many of these reasons are difficult to put into words. My co-founder Andrés also believes in STV and his way of describing things is often very different than mine in helpful ways and he recently posted his own description of this, so I also encourage you to read his comment.

MikeJohnson 10 Sep 2021 23:31 UTC
9 points
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in reply to: Gregory Lewis’s comment on: A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
Gregory, I’ll invite you to join the object-level discussion between Abby and I.

MikeJohnson 7 Sep 2021 22:48 UTC
9 points
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in reply to: SebK’s comment on: A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
Hi Seb, I appreciate the honest feedback and kind frame.
I can say that it’s difficult to write a short piece that will please a diverse audience, but that ducks the responsibility of the writer.
You might be interested in my reply to Linch which notes that STV may be useful even if false; I would be surprised if it were false but it wouldn’t be an end to qualia research, merely a new interesting chapter.
I spoke with the team today about data, and we just got a new batch this week we’re optimistic has exactly the properties we’re looking for (meditative cessations, all 8 jhanas in various orders, DTI along with the fMRI). We have a lot of people on our team page but to this point QRI has mostly been fueled by volunteer work (I paid myself my first paycheck this month, after nearly five years) so we don’t always have the resources to do everything we want to do as fast as we want to do it, but I’m optimistic we’ll have something to at least circulate privately within a few months.