Interview with Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Taking Phenomenology Seriously
Qualia Research and the Future of Consciousness
What follows is a transcript of a conversation with Andrés Gómez Emilsson, president of the Qualia Research Institute (qri.org), co-founder of the Stanford Transhumanist Association, author at qualiacomputing.com, and first-place winner of the Norway Math Olympiad. Andrés holds degrees in computational psychology and machine learning from Stanford. It is difficult to convey how refreshing it is to speak to someone as open-minded as Andrés! This transcipt was polished slightly by AI.
Listen to the audio here.
William Joy: It's an honor to talk. I've been reading your articles on qualia computing and on qri.org and they've been fascinating. I wanted to start with the paradigm shift that qualia research is pioneering. Since Titchener effectively, psychology has mostly abandoned introspection and structuralism—the focus on subjective experience and its exploration through first-person methodology. It's thought that for it to be scientific, psychology has to be divorced from subjectivity. But really, it's consciousness, it's subjectivity that gives life to psychology. I'm glad to see that you seem to be driving this paradigm shift. Could you talk about the philosophy that qualia research is predicated on?
Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Yeah, very good way to start and thank you for having me here. I enjoyed your interview with David Pearce. You seem to have good taste in researchers.
One of the mottoes of Qualia Research Institute is "taking phenomenology seriously." We think that there is a very large amount of information (both in research as well as practical applications) that is just discarded, but is really relevant for understanding the nature of our experience, the nature of the world, and maybe even metaphysics.
I'll give you a very concrete example. This relates to something very practical we are working on. If you go to the doctor and have a particular kind of strange pain in your arm or leg, typically they will give you something like a questionnaire that says, "From one to ten, how intense is your pain?" If it's sophisticated, they might even give you one of these questionnaires where they ask you: Is this blunt pain? Is this sharp pain? Is this pins and needles?
The thing is that almost nobody knows what that means. "Is this blunt pain?" I don't know. We don't use those words in everyday language. There is some clustering analysis that usually is done with surveys like that. There's a little bit of predictive ability. So they say, "We can't really diagnose you. Maybe you have fibromyalgia," or something like that. That's typically what may happen. But there's a lot of detailed information that you're actually just not communicating.
Is the pain something that has very high spatial frequencies? Is it a very detailed type of pain? Or is it something that strobes and comes and goes at a specific frequency? All of that information, I think, at least at QRI, is significant, diagnosis relevant, and potentially important for figuring out new treatment modalities.
So instead, what we are currently developing in-house is one of the big projects this year. It's the result of many years of research—essentially a tool to be able to visualize tactile sensations based on a ground truth dynamic system model where you adjust some parameters, you play with the system, and then you see emergent dynamics arise. You can imagine going to the doctor and rather than filling out a questionnaire, they show you ten different animations and they say, "Hey, which one is the one that is closest to your pain?"
Maybe you iterate over a couple of times until you find an animation that actually corresponds to your pain precisely. Our guess is that this will be much more diagnostic on the one hand. And second, it will also allow us to create interventions, whether it's a vibration machine or applying heat at a certain frequency, that we'll be able to actually cancel out or tackle or disable that particular kind of painful sensation.
With all of this, what I'm really trying to drive home is this idea that there is a lot of super detailed structural information in consciousness that we just lack the words and the culture and the rigor to essentially be able to utilize. The Qualia Research Institute is essentially making a big bet that this information is not nonsense. We actually can arrive at useful paradigms that way.
Maybe at a very high level, one key observation here that was very important when I started QRI with Romeo Stevens and Mike Johnson, the three original co-founders, was this idea that happiness is somehow related to harmony and symmetry, well-being, whereas discomfort is somehow related to dissonance and symmetry breaking effects in the field of experience. Once you notice that in retrospect, it feels extremely obvious. As far as I know, there aren't any deep counter examples to that pattern.
But in culture and in science, that's just something that is not pointed out, is not discussed, which in retrospect is really shocking. It's like, "Hey, there's this extremely low hanging fruit about how well-being connects to some mathematical structure, and we're just not collecting it." Which suggests that there's a whole bunch more information that we can effectively discover with the right paradigm.
William: Just to linger on the symmetry theory of valence, do you think that it can be related to Noether's theorem? What does Noether's theorem reveal about the fundamental physics of valence?
Andrés: You just jumped into the deep end with a super deep question. But it's true.
For those who are tuning in more broadly, Noether's theorem is a theorem in physics by Emmy Noether. It's a very deep theorem that relates symmetries and preserved constants, preserved values or what they call invariants in physics. So there is correspondence, for example, between spatial symmetry—that things look the same when you translate them, or translational symmetry—and the preservation of momentum. If you multiply the mass times the velocity of something, times the speed of something, that value gets preserved over time, even when you have collisions between things. There's a very deep reason why these two things are actually related. It's something along the lines of: the universe must look the same when you apply a certain symmetry to it. If you're moving at a constant speed and the universe is translationally symmetrical, there is a sense in which you can think of that as the whole universe is actually moving in the opposite direction, whereas you're actually static in the center. So there's a sense in which you can interpret these preserved constants as deeply just the result of that symmetry.
Now, I do think—and this is something we've been discussing at QRI for many years—there are some very interesting deep connections between the symmetry theory of valence originally proposed by Mike Johnson and then further developed at QRI. It's more or less as follows: When you're in a very pleasant, euphoric state of consciousness, my two go-to's that I think are very good examples, even though they're relatively rare, but they're very crisp and clean examples of these, are jhanas, which are concentration states in meditation, and N,N-DMT, the so-called God molecule. Both of these exhibit very crisp, clean geometric symmetry of the relevant sort.
Effectively what we find is that you have a very smooth field of consciousness, a very smooth energy body. What you see is that waves translate—they move around without dissipating or changing. So that actually indicates that there's a deep spatial symmetry that is going on. That as you move a pattern, the pattern doesn't change. And effectively, that gives you traveling waves. Whereas if there's some broken symmetry or some imperfection, as the wave moves, effectively the energy would be dissipating. It would be breaking into parts or splitting. If you're having very clean traveling waves, in some sense there might be a very deep physical reason why actually there's some invariant or some symmetry that underpins your experience.
William: To go back to philosophy, I think at one point it's said on QRI that our categorization of the brain at present relates more to the tools that we use to look at the brain than to its actual computational structure. How can we better understand the brain from the first-person experiential side, first of all, and also—I think you say: ‘instead of centering our exploration on the sorts of raw data our tools are able to gather, we can approach the brain as a self-organizing system, something which uses a few core principles to both build and regulate itself.’ Could you expound upon that?
Andrés: Here's one way of thinking about this. Typically how a lot of psychophysics research happens—research pertaining to perception—is somebody will build a set of tools for a particular purpose, studying autism or studying schizophrenia.
Then when a new disorder comes up—some kind of perceptual perseverance effect, some tracer effects caused by SSRIs or something like that—it is very common for the researchers to be constrained in terms of what they can actually use to study it. Why? Because whatever they use, they have to be able to justify based on pre-existing published research.
Usually the reasoning will be along the lines of: this test has been tried on something that at least superficially is similar. There were some real results, some effect size, one standard deviation difference between the conditions. So let's try it on these other conditions. But that is usually done where you essentially treat the patients, treat the participants almost—it sounds bad when I say this, but it's effectively what's happening—you treat them as objects in a sense. It's like, "Let's see what happens to these animals once you apply this particular condition." And there's a lot of rationale that would accelerate research that is just not viable or within the Overton window of research here.
Something more likely to work would be: if you find somebody with that particular condition that you're trying to study, and you spend an afternoon with them, effectively showing them hundreds of random images and random stimuli, and you interview them for "Hey, what actually looks different, what is strange about this?"
In that way, you're finding a needle in a haystack where you're trusting their capacity to judge their phenomenology as what is strange, what is expected. And then you construct a paradigm or an actual study around the things that that person subjectively found interesting.
That is essentially how we treat, for example, psychedelic research. In academia, people apply tests like, "This has been used for schizophrenia, which is maybe tangentially related to a psychedelic experience. Let's apply it on people who are tripping." Whereas how we approach it is: we build hundreds of experiments in advance. And then while somebody is on a psychedelic, they might just quickly explore those hundreds of experiments and zone in not necessarily on what is theoretically interesting, but zoning in on what is different and what is "OK, there's some kind of interaction between the state of consciousness and this stimuli."
This is one example where if you have a phenomenology first approach, you're able to find the needle in the haystack as opposed to being constrained by the pre-existing research and the pre-existing lenses that the scientific field affords you.
William: What progress has already been made in solving the five or eight main problems of consciousness, like the binding problem, the palette problem, etc.?
Andrés: That's a great question. We have published about the binding problem and in particular, you can think of it as its mirror image or the other side of the coin, which is the boundary problem. Maybe I can provide a little bit of context for people.
In philosophy of mind, it is very common for people to talk about the hard problem of consciousness, originally proposed by David Chalmers, which proposes: how is it conceptually possible to go from form and structure, form and function, mechanism to something like subjectivity? To getting to something like the intrinsic quality of experience? How do you make that jump? That's I think a very valid question and obviously very hard.
But it might be intractable in a sense. How do you even approach that problem? So instead, an aesthetic that we've pursued, all of our research lineages from David Pearce, Mike Johnson, Freiston—it's a very different kind of way of approaching this, where instead of saying, "Here's this insurmountable philosophical problem," we try to break it down into subcomponents that have some chance of actually getting some traction, making some progress.
One breakdown that we really like is from Mike Johnson, who broke it down into eight subproblems that essentially assumes that consciousness has mathematical structure. Then you're asking, if any moment of experience is a mathematical object, what do we need to answer about that?
There's going to be something about how the structure of that object will map onto phenomenology. There's also going to be a question about how you get the structure pertaining to the boundaries between experiences and the internal content within an experience and so on.
One of the key problems that I think a lot about is the boundary problem, the binding problem. In a world that is made of atoms and forces, the binding problem would be formulated as: How do you get a huge number of particles or a huge number of neurons to simultaneously contribute to a unified experience? What is the glue?
Whereas if you start with an ontology, with a makeup of reality that is more field based—the universe is made of electromagnetic fields and gravitational fields and strong force, weak force fields—how can you get boundaries in that field? Maybe everything is already unified. And then the question is, how do you get subcomponents within that massively unified object?
For a number of theoretical reasons, we suspect that the boundary problem is more solvable than the binding problem. The binding problem is in some sense conceptually more tricky and might be harder to tackle. Whereas the boundary problem has one clear path forward which is through the lens of topology.
One of our key papers is essentially the topological solution to the boundary problem as an overarching conceptual framework. Effectively what we hypothesize is that the way in which the underlying field of reality gets broken down into different moments of experience is through what's called a topological segmentation. Meaning that you have very clear or crisp looping structures within the field.
So if every point in the field has a little arrow that tells you, if you're a particle here, where would you be pushed towards? A topological boundary would be a loop such that if you're a particle, you're going to be constantly cycling around and there's just no way out of it. So within this perspective, maybe a moment of experience is actually this looping structure within the field.
That solves a bunch of problems. It explains why the boundary is causally significant, why evolution would be able to recruit it, use it for computational purposes, and also might be able to explain how is the boundary capable of emerging at this macroscopic scale. Because there's oftentimes the question of: the only true boundaries are quantum mechanical, but then the scale is all wrong. It's too extremely small and that's not the case.
So I would say, at least within the eight sub problems of consciousness, the boundary problem is something for which we have a tentative approach. I would say there's also at least some conceptual innovations pertaining to the palette problem. So the palette problem effectively asks what is the nature and the relationships between the different values of qualia. For example, the blueness of blue and the raspy dry quality of cinnamon scent.
Something worthwhile to mention there is that it's not a structureless space. The palette, the range of possible qualia values is very richly structured. You can use psychophysics experiments to probe effectively something like: what is the geometry of different components of that subspace?
I'll communicate an interesting insight here, which is in the space of color, it is well known that there are three key dimensions which form a Euclidean space. You have a white to black dimension. Then you also have a blue to yellow dimension and a red to green. Every shade of color is found as a point in this three dimensional space. And moreover, the number of hops in what's called just noticeable differences in that space actually corresponds to the geometric distance between the points. So it's a very richly, accurately structured space.
Two very concrete things that I can mention as conceptual innovations here. One is: one very easy way of being able to say that there are different shades of qualia, different qualia categories is when you define a qualia category as that which contains a path between any two points such that you can go from one to the other through just noticeable differences.
So color—red is very different than green, but you can go from red to green by making small jumps in color, which says they belong to the same field, to the same space. But you cannot go as far as we know from red to the smell of cinnamon. There's this critical point where maybe it becomes colorless and then it starts to be something like a scent. Then that's a qualitative jump. Something very weird happened there.
The other thing to mention is in the space of scents, we have found some evidence—we've yet to publish it, but it's something I feel pretty confident on that I think is an interesting innovation here—is that we're fairly confident at least internally that the geometry of scent is highly irregular. So in colors you actually have these very crisp three dimensions whereas in scent you have this very strange situation where what the research indicates is that if it was a Euclidean space of regular geometry, it would be at least 300 dimensions. So it's a very large space. But it's worse than that, scent. It's worse in the sense of it's more complex than maybe we wished in a sense. Although, of course, there's the flip side that is how wondrous that it's so complex.
The thing is that different combinations of shades of scent modify the distances between scents. So one key example I found early on in my explorations is that the combination of vanilla and pine—there's this very dry, woody pine scent and these sweet, soft vanilla scent. If you mix them just with each other, you actually get this what we call multi-phasic scent, which alternates between vanilla, pine, pine, vanilla in a chaotic random way. Small differences in proportion are very obvious. It's like 40% versus 60% is very clearly different than 60% versus 40%. Your system detects those smaller variations.
Whereas if you add a little bit of what's called a musk in perfumery, which is actually a very clean, laundry type of scent. One example is Galaxolide is very common in perfumery and in laundry. What happens is that those small differences get washed away and they don't matter very much. Also rather than having these flickering effects, you get these smooth mixtures. You get: this is solidly a pine vanilla alloy and they're not in competition anymore.
In and of itself, that tells you that as you move in the musk dimension, the distances between other scents shrink, which would suggest it's actually almost a black hole or a curved space around the musk dimension, indicating that this is a strange, irregular space is not as simple as a high dimensional map, it's even stranger. So whatever solution to the palette problem there is, it's going to have to account for these strange behaviors.
William: To what extent is it necessary [or helpful] to presuppose David Pearce's monistic non-materialist physicalism to do qualia research?
Andrés: That's a great question. No, I would say it's not necessary. It's a very good question because obviously I'm very immersed in that way of thinking and metaphysics.
There's a couple of things that come to mind. One is whether your theory of consciousness equips you with the ability to richly explore the state space and draw meaningful conclusions about it. A different thing is whether the theory makes it seem worthwhile to explore that.
So in my opinion, the David Pearce perspective or broadly speaking, what we have built at QRI or even something like integrated information theory—the thing that I'm really pointing at is this idea that consciousness is real and there's rich mathematical structure behind it. If you're in that very broad camp, that will allow you to do a lot of really useful research, right, because you're going to be looking for the mathematical structure of the differences between shades of consciousness. It's a very rich paradigm to explore.
On the other hand, if you're in the Daniel Dennett or the Churchland type of perspective, where they say consciousness is illusory, maybe it doesn't even exist or it's a bag of tricks. You actually are more concerned about just not being deceived by your own experience. Oftentimes people in those camps are painfully intellectually un-curious. It's like they're so afraid of being tricked that they just don't engage with these questions at a deep level. They might engage with smell, for example, superficially, but they will usually not entertain exploring DMT or psilocybin or salvia or all of that. Usually their conceptual framework would invalidate it. It would say, "Well, that's just random firing of neurons. What do you expect to learn from that?"
In that sense, the aesthetic that the theory or conceptual paradigm provides invalidates the reason behind a lot of these explorations and this research. But that is not to say that you couldn't in principle learn something useful. I would argue in particular, not as extreme as eliminativists, people who believe consciousness is actually an illusion. You could go halfway into computationalists, people who say consciousness is real, but it's an emergent computational phenomenon. Maybe it has to do with second order intentionality or a model that reasons about itself. There's a lot of people who think in that way.
There, there's still a whole lot that you can explore and you can explore very rigorously and mathematically. Now it's not going to look like physics. In the QRI paradigm, we very much think each moment of experience will correspond to a physical object with actual equations. There's going to be a clear mapping to the standard model of physics. In the computationalist paradigm, they're not going to expect that. Actually they will expect something like, "Well, no, a shade of consciousness is an algorithm." You can specify it as a program, several lines of code. So they might try to interpret it as "How can I write a program that might generate this type of behavior?"
Still could be very insightful. Honestly, we need as many perspectives as possible because this is a very tough problem. Of course, I would bet more on we're going to go faster if we take the physics route. But yeah.
William: I don't think we need the people who think that consciousness is an illusion, that's a... I think if there's one truly stupid idea... If there is one stupid question, it's ‘is consciousness an illusion?’
Andrés: Yeah. It is a little bit shocking to be honest, sometimes hanging out in that crowd.
William: What status do you give to the various epistemic and religious and ideological lineages that have attempted to understand the mind, like Buddhism, Taoism, other Eastern traditions or philosophers like Nietzsche or Heidegger? And also modern cognitive science, what blind spots do you think it has presently?
Andrés: Very great question. The first thing I will say is I am not a scholar of religion. I am a big fan of Buddhism because they care a lot about phenomenology and they map phenomenology very carefully. I think Buddhism has some of the best maps of meditation when it comes to defining the criteria for different jhanas, for example. It's incredible that since the time of the Buddha, there's these lists of what does the third jhana consist of? And it's super technical and precise.
There's a little bit of a concern about over-feeding around those models. Definitely something that I see is that if I talk to a real Buddhist or somebody who's been in a monastery for years, which I do often, they tend to overlearn those frameworks. Oftentimes they take it as received wisdom. It's like, "Well, this is just the truth. The Buddha said so. This is just how it is." Whereas I think, actually, we could develop it further. There's no reason why everything that the Buddha said has to be the final word. I think that's a very naive conception. It's also not very aware of memetics, rather than ideologies and philosophies don't always necessarily converge to what's more true. By default, they will converge towards the things that make them the easiest to propagate.
You can expect that even if the Buddha was a nerd who was really trying to catalog the state space of consciousness, still, for memetic reasons, what we will be seeing today would probably be a more shareable version, the more viral version of whatever was actually originally discussed. So there's reasons to keep our distance to some extent, if what we care about is that ultimate truth.
The other important bias here is that there are some subtle distinctions between techniques that are designed to make you feel good that influence your belief versus things that are designed to be as true as possible. In Buddhism, they're very clear that Buddha, there's a quote, it's like, "teach one thing and one thing only, suffering and the reduction of suffering." There's a lot of techniques that as far as I can tell, they're not truth maximizing. They're essentially, "If you do these and affect your belief structure in such and such a way, you're going to feel better."
Because that's what they are concerned about. People do it and they change their belief. One example is impermanence. Deeply internalizing the impermanence of reality is something that is purported to reduce suffering. And I think there's something very true about it. However, typically a Buddhist will overextend their conception of impermanence to metaphysics. They might say, "Well, fundamentally reality is impermanent."
Whereas I could definitely imagine a scenario where metaphysically, the truth is eternalism—maybe everything is just there, what's called the block universe—but phenomenologically, it makes sense to treat things as impermanent because that reduces suffering. So in my mind, there's this clear distinction between ultimate truth versus pragmatic approaches to truth. Buddhism, I would put it largely as pragmatic approaches, which very much reduces its status as the ultimate truth.
I think this is about as good as it gets personally. Again, I'm not a scholar here, but from what I have seen, Buddhism is kind of as good as it gets. The moment you get to Scientology, it's just a fairy tale. It's not truth orthogonal at that point.
You also asked about Heidegger and Nietzsche. I would say I'm a casual reader of many of these classics. I took some courses in college and have read some books by Nietzsche for fun, for example, but I'm not an expert. I would maybe apply a similar lens, that a lot of very popular authors are popular precisely because they resonate with a big audience. Sometimes I think many authors are essentially ahead of their time. So if they don't have a strong audience that resonates with them in their historical period, their writings get lost. So in some sense, you don't really get the most advanced philosopher for each era. What you get is the most advanced that caused a big stir or a big resonance or at the very least after they died or soon after for some motivation to preserve those writings.
In particular, I think Nietzsche, I wouldn't say he's orthogonal to truth, but a lot of his philosophy does seem to me social commentary and very much not to the level of oppositional defiance disorder, but something along the lines of "you can't make me believe, you can't make me believe in your morality" sort of libertarian type of value system, which, it's good that people like that exist. But I wouldn't read too much into it as far as understanding the nature of reality.
William: Do you think that there are blind spots to modern cognitive science?
Andrés: I would say several. First is not taking seriously extreme states of consciousness. That is slowly changing and changing in a strange and out of order way. But it is changing. Of course, jhanas, psychedelic states, dissociative states. I think all of those are extremely important for understanding consciousness.
But nowadays, there's a lab at Harvard that is studying advanced meditation full time and they're bringing people of the jhanas into the fMRIs and interviewing them. Things are changing for sure. But even something like DMT, at least in standard academia, it's typically studied in a very conventional way with conventional questionnaires and they take people off the streets who don't have that much experience with these substances. There's a whole lot of missed opportunities for cataloging what's actually weird and interesting about this.
Within that space, I would say that one of the very big blind spots is the ways in which these exotic states of consciousness open up novel computational capabilities.
For me, as far as DMT is concerned, I am not impressed by the fact that people report seeing clowns or aliens or mantises. I could imagine there's some archetypal representations that we tap into the resonant modes, the attractors, not that surprising. What I am very surprised by is the very strange computational properties of those states that you can sometimes stumble upon a DMT state where you're presented any map and almost instantly there's an intelligence that paints it in such a way that it only uses four colors and no two adjacent countries have the same color. That's very difficult to do. So you're tapping into some computational capacity of the mind that is unusual.
I would say that as a research objective, point to your research towards these weird computational properties is a huge blind spot. For the most part, how research is done these days is, "Let's find the deficiencies."
One study that I chuckle every time I mention it is you can find a study of people that were given ketamine and then administered an IQ test. It's like, you're not going to learn very much about the state by you're right, you have a lower IQ when you're on ketamine. But that's just not interesting. It's much more interesting: in what way did this enhance your social cognition, for example.
William: Is it incidental that you seem to emphasize DMT more than psilocybin and LSD and other psychedelics?
Andrés: I would say it's not incidental. I could... Let me come up with a good analogy. I think there's an interesting physics analogy here, which would be something like... Let's say classic psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline. If we go to the physics metaphor. So most consciousness is room temperature. It's the consciousness we're used to. Let's say something like psilocybin LSD would be looking at fire. It's like, "Hey, this is weird. This is outside of the norm." Whereas DMT would be more looking at lasers or the photoelectric effect or superfluid helium. It's things that they're not just a little bit weird, but they're on a whole other level of weirdness that you didn't think was even possible or it just completely breaks the conceptual scheme.
For that reason I do emphasize it. I do think it's a higher level of weird.
William: To speak about philosophers who don't have nearly as much publicity as they should, I want to sojourn into David Pearce's vision of the hedonistic imperative, because that's really why finding an explanatory framework for consciousness matters. It's because we want to improve consciousness. How is the Qualia Research Institute working towards realizing his vision?
Andrés: Great question. I guess a little bit of background is that I think I stumbled upon David Pearce's writings when I was 16. I remember reading and just being shocked and having this feeling of "My gosh, there's somebody in the internet who makes sense or just somebody who's actually serious, intellectually serious, who actually wants to figure stuff out." Which maybe you can relate to some extent.
But no, it's like clearly he's somebody who he really is trying to answer the deep questions and it is not that concerned about how things sound. It's like, "How do we do the most good in a no nonsense way?" And he arrives at this controversial, but at least defensible perspective that a lot of suffering is ultimately genetically driven. This can be shown by corner cases, people who are genetically lucky such that they almost just never suffer in their life. There's a wide variety of these cases. There's cases where people legitimately just don't have any pain whatsoever, but sometimes that's not very adaptive.
They tend to die early because they bump into things they get infected or they do very dangerous things, but it's a sweet spot there's people who have higher than normal pain thresholds, but but still able to perceive damage if it is significant and what we observe is that they tend to be just way happier just on a day-to-day basis.
It doesn't make them anti-social or that, there's this misconception that you have to suffer in order to have empathy or care about others, which is just empirically just not the case at all. So that's a very grand vision is something like, "Well, maybe in the future we will all be genetically tweaked in such a way that the worst of suffering is completely physiologically impossible. And maybe even looking further ahead is like, well, maybe not literally, but inspirationally, our default state of consciousness might be more along the lines of MDMA, just this very wonderful, loving state." A lot of things need to happen before that is feasible. But conceivably that could be.
One of the lines of David Pearce that I thought was really interesting was how he talks about how in the long term future, taking drugs might be legitimately immoral because we will already be born in an optimal state. It's like any drug that you take will be a deviation from perfection. So why would you do that? Whereas nowadays, people take drugs for very good reasons. They may be in deep psychological pain or physical pain, taking something to take the edge off of that makes a lot of sense ethically.
Now the Qualia Research Institute is not genetics focused. We have nothing against it, but it's just, we think on the one hand, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to just basic research in consciousness that doesn't entail any genetic component. And then on the other side, there's also a lot of things that can be done to reduce suffering that are also just very ruthlessly basic pragmatic things.
So one of the big frames at Qualia Research Institute is that we have these three goals and they're all deeply aligned with David Pearce's vision, which is A, we want to reduce extreme suffering. We think that's an ethical priority. B, we want to increase the baseline, just figure out ways to be a little bit happier from moment to moment. And then C, we want to understand extremes of pleasure, really understand what is super happiness and how can we make it available and ethically perceivable by people?
Of course, in the long term, I think that might involve some deeper understanding of genetics and epigenetics and gene transcriptions and so on. But today we have actually found a good number of interventions that have to do with these three applications, three goals that are just very easy and pragmatic. I'll just mention a few of them.
Interestingly here, DMT becomes relevant again, but for a completely different reason, which is that there is this very unfortunate disorder called cluster headaches, which one in a thousand people suffer from, which is essentially described as the worst pain that people can possibly experience. That might not be quite technically true, but it's practically true. It is the worst pain that people in practice ever experience.
William: Suicide headaches.
Andrés: Yes, exactly. It's really an ethical emergency and an ethical tragedy that unfortunately is massively neglected.
A lot of significant aspects of our research actually concern identifying these cause areas that, for example, people in effective altruism, they may not realize that they are significant because they don't actually take consciousness seriously. They don't take the degrees and intensities of consciousness as something real and quantifiable, or at the very least something you can get a handle on.
It turns out that if you take small amounts of DMT while you're starting to get a cluster headache, it can abort it entirely. You go from 10 out of 10 pain to 1 out of 10 pain within seconds. DMT is physiologically very safe—it doesn't harm your body in any way, and the doses are very small. This is one of these no-brainers: if I was in power, if I was Elon Musk or something, on day one I would legalize DMT for people with cluster headaches because it just makes sense.
What we're working on in that space is crafting an open letter with specific policy suggestions for each country, such that anybody in the world can sign that letter. They can sign the worldwide version and also the country-specific one, call their representatives, and essentially get political pressure to legalize DMT for this application.
We've also done research on preventing kidney stones, which happens to be another big ethical tragedy. There's a very big category here that's very promising: tackling drug tolerance. The problem with MDMA, for example, is not the state itself—the problem is that you get used to it, and then you feel worse.
If we could figure out how to prevent neuronal adaptation to the state, that would have enormous downstream effects in terms of the area under the curve of wellbeing. Anything that has to do with tweaking our neural networks such that you don't adapt to pleasant sensations or you don't adapt to pain killers—that's another important aspect with enormous ramifications. Much more so than developing a new SSRI or inventing the next aspirin, which I think is very marginal in benefit.
There are very powerful leads for things that actually seem to reverse tolerance. One is ibogaine for opiates, and there's also flumazenil for sedatives, particularly benzodiazepines. With more resources, my first priority would be a massive research project on figuring out how to tackle drug tolerance, which I think is upstream of so many societal problems.
William: You also do research into neurotech. What could neurotech enable here?
Andres: Going back to what we call a tactile visualizer—a system to visualize tactile sensations. This is more uniquely QRI: the idea that pain and discomfort is literally a pattern of dissonance. There's a corresponding minor chord of vibrations in your body and mind. From our perspective, if we can catalog and find the signature of a particular kind of pain, then we can engineer a signal or vibration that will essentially disrupt it.
This particular frame comes from Mike Johnson: rather than thinking of pharmaceuticals, we need to enter a paradigm of what we call "patterned pseudocals." The thing we're affecting is not whether this is serotonin or dopamine—it's whether we're inducing traveling waves, consonance versus dissonance. I think that's a more fundamental, deeper truth about qualia space and hedonic tone.
A lot of our neurotechnology explores advancing that paradigm. It's not that the world is wrong about serotonin being relevant—it's just that that's still very removed. You can tackle the problem in a much more direct way: let's precisely describe the mathematics of the pain or discomfort and then find the surgical change to the pattern that will reduce its negative valence.
Some things we've explored are fairly blunt: applying body vibration in sync with music, as well as stroboscopic stimulation, and showing that there is such a thing as a music theory of body vibration. We have articles and videos about research we did in 2020-2021, where we showed that just as there are consonant and dissonant chords in music, there's the same in body vibration. You can apply a minor chord in your chest and it feels unsettling and anxiety-producing, as opposed to a major chord, which is cheerful and calming.
This is low-hanging fruit. You would imagine that a society that really takes phenomenology seriously would find this super obvious and everybody would know it. But for some reason, here we are.
William: To end, what research targets do you presently have your sights on? And how do you conceive of the broader transhumanist project in this century?
Andres: QRI has four main objectives this year. First, developing and making public the tactile visualizer. I want to crowdsource a huge dataset of all sorts of different pains and meditation states and be able to visualize it. Even if we just achieve that this year, I think that would be a year well used.
Second, we have a similar system but for psychedelic visuals, which we're also going to make public. It's essentially Photoshop but for visual psychedelic trippy effects. I'm hoping it'll have viral power, at least on Reddit or Hacker News. Hopefully it'll make it to the front page. We plan to crowdsource data so we can write studies saying something like "LSD causes this oscillatory dynamic" or "DMT causes this oscillatory dynamic"—very precise numbers for all of these, which advances the mission very directly.
Third, along with the previous two, we're writing a series of papers around all that. We're also planning a retreat—another meditation/psychedelic retreat focused on this paradigm we've been working on called "the brain as a nonlinear optical computer." It's the idea that the brain is essentially operating using holograms. We think there are particular inputs on DMT that make these very obvious. In particular, there's a four-dimensional lattice that's rotating in two ways at once (because in four dimensions, you can rotate in two ways at once). If you look at that on DMT, very interesting things happen in the space of holographic effects.
I want to bring physicists and mathematicians to look at that phenomenon, visualize it, and show that this probably suggests that the brain is essentially holographic. Very out there, high risk, high reward as far as whether we're going to find an effect or not. But I still think it's worth doing.
Fourth is making a big impact this year on the extreme suffering reduction angle, which is effectively trying to change the legislation for DMT and cluster headaches. Those are the big picture items. Of course, there are lots of little projects and collaborations, but waking up every day, those are the big items on my list this year.
William: Is it possible to contribute in any way to QRI, even in small ways?
Andres: We are definitely funding-constrained, and that has been the case since forever. There's a little bit of a Wizard of Oz phenomenon—sometimes people approach me thinking there's a huge organization behind this. But we are something like 30 contributors broadly. In terms of organizational resources, it really is a shoestring budget and barely getting by in terms of getting stuff done.
If you have wealthy friends or family members willing to donate, that honestly goes a very long way to continue supporting these initiatives—funding retreats, putting the technologies out there, open-sourcing the technology.
Another area is producing content. An interview is a great way to contribute, making explainer videos, engaging with the content, writing summaries of articles, or articles that connect things from general culture and understanding with QRI paradigms—like "How would Nietzsche think of QRI?"
More directly contributing to the research: because we are funding-constrained, we don't really have many paid opportunities. Although we try to have an intern cycle once a year where we bring in between three and 10 people for eight to 12 weeks. We collaborate with them on projects they're building towards.
Very broadly speaking, facilitating connections is valuable—if you have a friend who knows Lex Friedman or a famous podcaster or researcher, making those connections is always super valuable. Finally, knowing anybody who is extremely well experienced with fundraising or operations can be a force multiplier.
William: Alright. Well, thank you for being willing to talk. It was a great conversation.
Andres: Absolutely. Fantastic questions. Thank you so much for inviting me over. I wish your podcast the best.
William: Thank you. Enjoy the rest of your week.
Andres: Likewise.
To learn more about the Qualia Research Institute and their work, visit qri.org. To support their research, you can find donation information on their website.