2024 in a Nutshell
2024 was a transformative year for QRI. As a small team with a growing network of collaborators, we accomplished a great deal. With momentum on our side, we now look toward 2025 with plans to further our research, scale our team, and broaden our impact.
- 38 pieces of research published via HEART (two pilot studies on ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT).
- 2 peer-reviewed papers published (2 more under review), plus 7 long-form research pieces on our website.
- 4 digital tools developed, with more in the pipeline.
- Presentations at 3 major consciousness conferences.
- 4 official QRI meetups worldwide, 12 community-led meetups, and 2 intensive work retreats.
- Now raising $1M+ to scale our efforts in 2025 and beyond.
As a team of just two full-time members, we are enormously fortunate to count on a network of exceptionally talented collaborators, volunteers, and advisors who bring their knowledge of mathematics, physics, philosophy, programming, visual art, and contemplative practices (to name a few) to advance the science of consciousness. Our think tank model has proven remarkably fruitful this year, uncovering new pieces of the puzzle that expand on our previous work—ideas such as coupling kernels, projective intelligence, and the liquid crystalline dynamics underlying brain activity.
We believe we can achieve even more in 2025. Among others, we’ll release new tools showcasing how QRI’s paradigm gives rise to phenomenal consciousness, publish new pieces in academic venues, and expand our work on interventions to reduce extreme suffering. We have plenty of room for additional funding to execute our vision, so if you are excited to support mathematically rigorous consciousness research to enhance the well-being of all sentient beings, the best way to support us is to donate to us. And if you already support our work in any way: Thank you! None of this would have been possible without you.
Our Team
In 2024, the QRI team consisted of two full-time employees and a wide network of collaborators, volunteers, and advisors.
Notably, Roger Thisdell and Wystan Bryant-Scott joined QRI’s Board of Advisors in 2024. Both are experienced meditation teachers and phenomenologists whose insights into the nature of the mind have proven invaluable in refining QRI’s models and helping our members better navigate the state-space of consciousness. Our highly interdisciplinary Board of Advisors also includes David Pearce, Dr. Luca Turin, Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, and Dr. Shamil Chandaria.
Additionally, Dr. Alfredo Parra and Eliade Weismann joined our team of collaborators this year, focusing respectively on work to reduce extreme suffering and on the olfactory dimensions of consciousness.
Research
HEART
This year we published the results of two pilot studies we ran in 2023 through a new initiative called HEART (High Energy Awareness Research Team). We brought together a carefully selected group of meditators, psychonauts, physicists, and mathematicians who systematically studied the effects of Ayahuasca (in Brazil) and 5-MeO-DMT (in Canada) in safe, controlled, and legal settings. In total, we published 38 reports (6 and 32, respectively) ranging from technical frameworks describing the underlying brain dynamics (such as applying the theory of liquid crystals to distinguish between DMT and 5-MeO-DMT) to more practical guides and visual replications.
Our overall assessment of these studies is that we gained more insights into the properties of consciousness during those few days than from months or possibly years of less focused explorations. We are excited to conduct similar studies in the future.
Peer-Reviewed Research
We continued our efforts to bring QRI’s ideas into the scientific discourse through peer-reviewed research. In 2024, we published two new papers, and three more are under review.
Your Red Isn’t My Red! Connectionist Structuralism and the Puzzle of Abstract Objects
Chris Percy | Synthese
This paper presents a nine-step argument for “Connectionist Structuralism” (CS), a physical nominalist position that takes seriously the non-physical phenomenology of abstract objects. Using evidence from cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, and evolutionary biology, and a fully worked toy example, the paper describes how CS can support our core cognitive uses of sensible properties and account for our core phenomenal experiences of them.
Can Lists of Requirements Help Consciousness Research Navigate its Epistemological Quandaries?
Chris Percy | Journal of Consciousness Studies (forthcoming)
Frustration has been growing with mainstay epistemological methods of logical deduction and experimental falsification for assessing theories of consciousness. This paper explores one among several alternatives being proposed: the listed requirements epistemology.
The Heavy Tail of Extreme Pain Exacerbates Health Inequality: Evidence From Cluster Headache Underinvestment
Alfredo Parra-Hinojosa, Chris Percy, and Andrés Gómez-Emilsson (under review)
This paper argues that current healthcare metrics systematically undervalue conditions causing extreme pain to patients, such as cluster headache. We quantify the burden of extreme pain from cluster headache globally and the UK, and argue that research investment is disproportionate to its burden, considering that it affects as many people as multiple sclerosis, which receives vastly more resources.
Cessation States: Computer Simulations, Phenomenological Assessments, and EMF Theories
Chris Percy, Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, and Bijan Fakhri | (under review)
This paper explores how electromagnetic field topology can explain cessation states: periods characterized by “absence of content” such as sleep, anesthesia, or full-absorption meditation. We build computational simulations of such states, test them on eight interviewees, and set out empirical tests with 11 specific predictions.
Ontological Diversity in Fundamental Physics and its Significance for Consciousness Research
Chris Percy and Alfredo Parra-Hinojosa | (under review)
This paper presents the results of a structured literature review of explicitly ontological theories advanced in the last six years with respect to fundamental physics. We outline 24 distinct theoretical positions and identify three main points of relevance for consciousness theorists in analytic philosophy who seek to be consistent with prevailing physical theories.
Additionally, QRI’s work was cited in at least three academic papers in 2024 (1, 2, 3), which we take as positive evidence that the ideas we developed several years ago are now finding resonance in academic research.
Conferences
QRI members also attended three conferences related to consciousness.
- The Science of Consciousness 2024: Several teammates and collaborators attended TSC 2024 in Tucson and presented three pieces of research
- Electromagnetic Field Topology as a Solution to the Boundary Problem of Consciousness (talk by Andres; video recording, slides)
- A Multidisciplinary Taxonomy of Consciousness Explananada: How an EM Field Theory Stacks Up Against a Working List of 83 Criteria (poster presented by Chris and Andres)
- The ‘Hard Problem’ of Valence: Efforts to Date and Why More is Needed (talk by Asher, video recording).
- We had the opportunity to meet up with friends of QRI such as Brad Caldwell and Justin Riddle, and winner of the QRI Psychedelic Replication and Psychedelic Cryptography last year and now QRI collaborator, Symmetric Vision’s art was showcased at the conference party. Andreas summarized the conference experience in this Qualia Computing post.
- Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) 27:Chris Percy attended ASSC27 in Tokyo on behalf of QRI and presented three pieces:
- The Heavy-Tailed Valence Hypothesis: When You’re Really Happy, How Happy Are You Really? (poster and presentation at the ASSC main event)
- Structured Phenomenology: Approach Overview & Intro to a New Tracer Tool for Deciphering the Visual Signal
- Characteristics of Altered State Consciousness (presentation at the “States of Consciousness” satellite event)
- Are Algorithms Always Arbitrary? Three Types of Arbitrariness and Ways to Overcome the Computationalist’s Trilemma (poster at the “Qualia Structure” satellite event)
- PhilaDelic 2024: Ethan Kuntz, Cube Flipper, and Andrés represented QRI at this year’s PhilaDelic. Andrés gave a plenary talk titled: On the Phenomenology of 5-MeO-DMT: A New Research Paradigm, The Think Tank Approach.
Other Research
Beyond our reports from HEART and our academic papers, we published seven long-form research pieces on our website:
- Reflections on Fusions of Consciousness, by Chris Percy
- Navigating Between Phenomena and Artefacts: A Critica History of Neuroscientific Interpretations of Brain Waves, by Riccardo Volpato
- Abandoning Functionalism: Some Intuition Pumps, by Alfredo Parra
- The Electrostatic Brain: How a Web of Neurons Generates the World-Simulation that is You, by Bijan Fakhri, Chris Percy, and Andrés Gómez-Emilsson
- Towards Computational Simulations of Cessation, by Andrés Gómez-Emilsson
- Quantifying the Global Burden of Extreme Pain from Cluster Headaches, by Alfredo Parra
QRI also supported the Carhart-Harris Lab in developing a survey to examine the effects of psilocybin, ketamine, and MDMA.
Finally, QRI’s teammates and collaborators published many more pieces on their blogs. Some highlights include:
- Costs of Embodiment, by Andrés Gómez-Emilsson
- Interface Design in the Age of Qualiatech: Do You Want to be a Button?, by Cube Flipper
- Qualia Formalism, Non-materialist Physicalism, and the Limits of Analysis: A Philosophical Dialogue with David Pearce and Kristian Rönn, by Asher Soryl
Research Tools
This year we invested significant resources into developing digital tools that aim to support or illustrate our research. We published four tools:
- Coupling Kernels on a 2D Grid (further details and music video)
- Visualizing 4D Rotations (further details and video explainer)
- Gestalt Detector: Simplification via Structural Alignment (further details)
- Fractal Recursive Coherence (further details
We will publish four more tools very soon: A tool to entrain with and simulate attention field lines, a pain visualization tool, a psychedelic replication tool, and a suite of questionnaires to improve on the Mystical Experience Questionnaire. We also highly recommend this tool to learn to recognize wallpaper symmetry groups, developed by our friend Taru.
Field Building
Media
We continued our efforts to make our ideas more widely known and accessible through various media: We released three long-form conversations on YouTube, and Andrés appeared on ten podcasts and released eight explainer videos on his channel. We particularly recommend these videos:
- Grounding QRI in First Principles (Part I): Bridging Computation and Philosophy
- From Gemologist to Psychedelic Retreat Founder: Jessica’s Journey of Healing Chronic Pain
- Projective Intelligence: How the Visual/Tactile Fields Use Projective Geometry for Signal Processing
We also re-released the Superhappiness Guidebook, and members of our community published a QRI wiki. QRI was also mentioned in the Asterisk article “Manufacturing Bliss”.
Meetups & Talks
The global QRI community remained vibrant and active in 2024. We hosted four official QRI meetups in Mexico City, Austin, Berlin, and Stockholm with fantastic turnout and atmosphere, which led to numerous valuable new connections and insights. These events also allowed us to strengthen our ties with other research groups such as the EPRC, the IACS, and Foresight Institute, among others. Our collaborators and supporters in multiple countries organized another 12 meetups, and meetups in London and Los Angeles have become recurring. We also continued hosting our recurring “Phenomenology Club,” an invitation-only meetup that gathers top scientists, philosophers, artists, meditators, and psychonauts to discuss specific topics related to phenomenology.
Andrés also gave talks at events organized by PsyDao and Seed Club Ventures / Foresight Institute in Berlin, Depict in Stockholm (online talk), and the IACS in Santa Monica. He also met with researchers from F.I.V.E., UCL, and Imperial College as part of their study on 5-MeO-DMT in Mexico.
Retreats
This year we organized two intensive work retreats for QRI teammates and collaborators to make focused progress on theory and strategy, and to foster team cohesion. The first retreat near Stockholm, Sweden was more focused on strategy, but the piece “Costs of Embodiment” also came out of this time together. For the second retreat in Tepoztlán, Mexico, we brought together eight experts from different technical fields (particularly computer scientists and mathematicians) for two weeks to develop new tools based on QRI theoretical frameworks. This turned out to be an exceptionally productive time, resulting in a new psychedelic replication tool, a new tool to visualize physical pain, and a new suite of questionnaires to capture the phenomenology of various substances for academic research (to significantly improve on the Mystical Experience Questionnaire). It was during this time that we discovered that the coupled oscillator paradigm we’ve been developing primarily from phenomenological data aligns closely with recent neuroscientific work demonstrating divisive normalizationas a canonical computation throughout the human visual system, lending additional credence to the validity of the underlying ideas.
Plans for 2025
All of the new insights, connections, collaborations, and tools that have come out of our work in 2024 have opened many exciting directions for 2025. We have more ideas than we can possibly implement, but we are optimistic that we can leverage our network of exceptional collaborators to continue pushing the boundary of consciousness research.
In terms of organizational strategy:
- At a very high level, we want to continue establishing QRI as one of the authorities on exotic forms of consciousnesses. This involves defining the field of consciousness interpretability by demonstrating the utility of researching consciousness through direct observation. We believe that we are at the forefront of this approach, in large part thanks to the intellectual freedom enabled by our independent nonprofit status.
- We aim to raise at least $1m in additional funding, to unlock the talent of our collaborators (ideally, by hiring two senior full-time researchers and several more contractors already in our network), work together with well-established research groups to advance QRI ideas, run additional technical and phenomenological retreats, and affectively tune our brand’s aesthetic. We are particularly excited about our latent connections at top academic institutions, such as Oxford University, Imperial College, Penn State, and UC Berkeley.
- We plan to expand our work on reducing extreme suffering, both the theoretical underpinnings (e.g. the heavy-tailed valence hypothesis) and the practical applications (e.g. by gathering experts and practitioners in a themed conference).
In terms of research:
- Building on the success of our previous HEART retreats, we would like to run additional smaller, fine-tuned studies (e.g. on the phenomenology of N,N-DMT, ketamine, or 5-MeO-DMT with EEG). With sufficient funding, we could commission short documentaries to extend the reach of our outputs.
- We have several academic papers in the pipeline that we plan to submit for publication and present at scientific conferences. We established a few new connections with researchers in academia that we would like to capitalize on.
- We will continue to develop software tools and simulations to showcase our ideas and test their validity.
- Some ongoing research projects include: Virtual games to modulate attention based on the coupling kernel paradigm, a tool to visualize physical pain, and various academic papers (e.g. on the heavy-tailed valence hypothesis and cluster headaches, the ‘hard problem’ of valence, and ‘structured phenomenology’).
In terms of field building:
- We will pursue high-profile podcast opportunities (of which we already have some leads) to disseminate QRI ideas widely.
- We will continue to host team retreats as well as official and community-driven meetups worldwide.
- We would like to invest resources into making our ideas more relatable and digestible, e.g. via demos, animations, explainers, and simulations.
- For our work on reducing extreme suffering, we would like to run a summer fellowship and an interdisciplinary conference with experts, among others.
How to Support Us
If you are excited about our work, the best way to support us at this time is by donating to us (bank, card, PayPal, Venmo, crypto, stocks, and DAFs). Or donate at least $100 via our Magical Creatures page to receive one of our phenomenal scent sample packs as a token of our appreciation. We rely entirely on the generous support of donors who believe in our mission. Feel free to contact us at donations@qri.org to learn more about how your donation could support our work under different growth scenarios. Donations are tax-deductible in the US.
If you’d like to support us but are not in a position to donate, here are other ways to do so:
- Share this page with anyone interested in supporting us
- Subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on social media (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook)
- Attend and share our events (which we announce in our newsletter and on social media)
- Organize a local QRI meetup
- Apply to work with us
- Join the QRI Discord
Thank you for your continued support! We look forward to an exciting 2025.
