One day you decide to destroy hell. What happens next?
First you figure out what hell is. Making war on the correct thing is important. For QRI that thing is suffering.
Second you assemble people who believe what you’re doing is possible and noble.
Third you build technical capabilities for detecting suffering, with the expectation that what you can measure you can manage.
Fourth you identify an intervention that can actually help people. Ideally it’s non-invasive, inexpensive, and fun, something people would actually use.
Fifth you network — building alliances and marshalling resources for scaling research and interventions. Preparing the actual assault.
This is where we are now- not the end of the journey but not the start, either. Maybe 70% into the second chapter (there are a lot of chapters!).
We’re really proud of recent progress. Core wins:
Finishing our technical pipeline for neuroimaging analysis - becoming one of a handful of labs in the world that can do a full “CSHW” analysis (decomposing brain activity into its connectome resonances, similar to decomposing a song into specific notes)
Partnership with one of the biggest psychedelics lab in the world, to work on CSHW together
Partnership with a prominent meditator and prominent university to analyze jhana (blissful meditative) states
An online internship cycle with 16(!) amazing young people, mostly from the Ivy League psychedelics network
Online psychophysics tool for precisely estimating and reproducing the parameters of one’s visual field during psychedelic experiences (public beta shortly)
Progress on: ops, hardware prototyping, an academic paper on the Symmetry Theory of Valence, website redesign, research into smell, and the QRI Guide to Superhappiness
What’s next for QRI? Our current big opportunities are:
Testing the Symmetry Theory of Valence (STV) with a study on jhanas
Expanding our toolkit of analysis techniques for neuroimaging data, in particular finalizing our “CDNS” implementation for quantifying harmony in brains
Developing various hardware prototypes further
Finalizing and running initial studies with our psychophysics tool
Establishing a physical campus for QRI
A fundraising push- we’ll be putting together specific targets and numbers over the next couple weeks.
It’s hard work but we’re really enjoying the journey. Thank you for your interest and support.
On behalf of QRI,
Michael Edward Johnson
Executive Director, Qualia Research Institute
For attribution, please cite this work as
Johnson (2020, Sept. 16). State of the Qualia, Fall 2020. Retrieved from https://www.qri.org/blog/state-of-the-qualia-fall-2020
BibTeX citation
@misc{johnson2020state,
author = {Johnson, Michael Edward},
title = {State of the Qualia, Fall 2020},
url = {https://www.qri.org/blog/state-of-the-qualia-fall-2020},
year = {2020}
}