Opentheory is the site of Michael Edward Johnson, with essays on consciousness, neuroscience, meditation, and theories of autism.
HN commenters find the autism and vasocomputation posts interesting, though one casual reader says he cannot vouch for their accuracy, and others debate its consciousness theories.
Yes, it's called Advaita Vedanta. Swami Sarvapriyananda's lectures are always a great source of knowledge about Advaita.
So Advaita is about you, that is, about consciousness. You are consciousness. And then it goes something like "you're not your body and you're not your mind, you are the "pure subjectivity" present in any qualia, you are Sakshi." Or Atman, also a popular term.
Also there's that equation that Atman = Brahman (brahman being the universe/existence itself? [1] but I don't buy it, maybe I don't understand what that means yet)
And all of this supposedly is ought to make you feel better about your own problems or suffering, idk? I'm not sure how tbh, I just have a metaphysical interest in this topic. It didn't help me with my problems.
So in every qualia there is the content of experience, and then there is the very first-personal givenness of whatever is subjectively given [2]. Experiential presence. But it's only a conceptual difference, not a real nomological/metaphysical one. There's just qualia. There cannot be qualia without an experiencer, an experiencing that is happening. We wouldn't even call that "qualia". Similarly, there cannot be just this abstract quality of first-personal givenness, mere subjectivity without contents. We wouldn't call that an experience.
So in Advaitic terms: consciousness = subjectivity = Sakshi (just a laconic term) [3] = experiential presence = immediacy of experience = mineness = for-me-ness = the first-personal givenness…
Hello!
I'm the author of this article. I stand by it and I think comments are failing to engaging with the actual models, phenomenological observations, and synthesis provided. I suspect people here have not actually payed attention to these experiences and may have epistemological assumptions that make them think it's impossible to bring useful information back. In particular, I'll say that the article's analysis assumes indirect realism about perception (it's all "in your head"), it focuses on structural features of the experience (phenomenal character rather than intentional content - I'm not interested in what the machine elves told you, I'm interested in what were the wallpaper symmetry groups that were covering their garments!), and tries to do what we named "algorithmic reductions" (i.e. identifying simple processes or effects that when stacked together might generate enormous emergent complexity - as in chemistry and physics, the rules are simple yet the emergent effects can have incredible complexity). In other words, this is a first attempt at a scientific and algorithmic understanding of the rich phenomenology of DMT without either (a) ignoring the facts, or (b) taking the semantic content of the experience at face value. I hope you enjoy it! :)
Admittedly, the article is a little old (2016) - but I have yet to see anyone go much further than it. I look forward to rational, scientifically-minded, and smart psychonauts actually engage with the content.
In the…
Don't worry: Tononi (and, by extension, Koch) have thought about IIT much more than the author of this article.
You are correctly pointing out the conflict between computationalism ("consciousness is what certain computations feels like from the inside") and physicalism ("consciousness is what certain computations feel like from the inside, when they take place on physical substrates, perhaps requiring the involvement of quantum decoherence").
One of the best primers on the current state of academic hypotheses on these topics is the whitepaper "Principia Qualia" by the good folks at the Qualia Research Institute [0].
[0] https://opentheory.net/PrincipiaQualia.pdf
Michael Edward Johnson has an interesting theory called vasocomputation with the core hypothesis:
> vasomuscular tension stabilizes local neural patterns. A sustained thought is a pattern of vascular clenching that reduces dynamic range in nearby neurons. The thought (congealed pattern) persists until the muscle relaxes.
https://opentheory.net/2023/07/principles-of-vasocomputation-a-unification-of-buddhist-phenomenology-active-inference-and-physical-reflex-part-i/
https://x.com/johnsonmxe/status/1863603206649208983
I wouldn't call the mapping necessarily arbitrary. The causal/information processes that your nerves connect to may have some mathematical structure that distinguishes them.
There's the symmetry theory of valence which proposes that symmetric (in some strict mathematical sense) processes feel good, and vice versa with bad qualia.
But this is only one of many subproblems: https://opentheory.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Eight-Problems2-1-1024x611.png
> You must be confused. The words Buddhist or Twitter do not appear anywhere in this paper.
I'm referring to the link in the parent comment: https://opentheory.net/2023/07/principles-of-vasocomputation-a-unification-of-buddhist-phenomenology-active-inference-and-physical-reflex-part-i/
It has "Buddhist" in the URL, the title, and the first sentence.