The QRI Ecosystem: Friends, Collaborators, Blogs, Media, and Adjacent Communities

The Qualia Research Institute has the vision of a world free from involuntary suffering in which conscious agents are empowered to have full control over their lived experiences. Its mission tackles this objective by combining foundational research on consciousness with a focus on explaining the mathematical properties of pleasure and pain for a full, formal account of valence.

By relating our mission to existing memeplexes, we could perhaps accurately describe the ethos of QRI as “Qualia Formalist Sentientist Effective Altruism“. That’s a mouthful. Let’s break it down:

Qualia Formalism refers to the notion that experience has a precise mathematical description that ties it with physics (for a more detailed breakdown see the Formalism section of the glossary).
Sentientism refers to the claim that value and disvalue are entirely expressed in the nature and quality of conscious experiences. In other words, that the only reason why states of affairs matter is because of the way in which they impact experiences.
Effective Altruism refers to the view that we can aspire to do the most good we can rather than settle for less. If you examine the actual extent to which different interventions cash out in terms of reduction in suffering throughout the world, you will notice that they follow a long-tail distribution. Thus, research on how to prioritize interventions really pays off. Focusing on the top interventions (and being willing to spend extra time digging for even better ones) can multiply your positive impact by orders of magnitude.

We could thus say that people and organizations are more or less aligned with QRI to the extent that they are aligned with each of these notions and their combinations thereof. More so, QRI also values the practice of rational psychonautics and the study of one’s own mind with meditation – hence we also include lists of rational psychonauts and great dharma teachers.

Find below the list of people and organizations that have a significant degree of alignment with QRI on each front. We also include a list of blogs and websites from readers of our work, which is meant to incentivize community-building around the aforementioned core ideas.

Format:

Name of Person/Organization – Blog/Website/Media [if any] (Representative Post of the Author- Sometimes Not from Their Primary Site [if any])

QRI Canon

Qualia Research Institute – QRI (Glossary)

Michael Edward Johnson – Open Theory (Neural Annealing)

Andrés Gómez Emilsson – Qualia Computing (Wireheading Done Right)

Current and Former QRI Employees and Collaborators Who Write About QRI Topics

Romeo Stevens – Neurotic Gradient Descent (Core Transformation)

Quintin Frerichs – The Youtopia Project (Wada Test + Phenomenal Puzzles)

Andrew “Zuck” Zuckerman – andzuck.com (Super Free Will)

Kenneth Shinozuka – Blank Horizons (A Future for Humanity)

Wendi Yan – wendiyan.com (The Psychedelic Club)

Jeremy Hadfield – jeremyhadfield.com (How to Steal a Vibe)

Elin Ahlstrand – Mind Nomad (Floating Through First Fears)

Margareta Wassinge and Anders Amelin – Qualia Productions (When AI Means Advanced Incompetence)

List of current and former QRI collaborators and volunteers not listed above (in no particular order): Patrick Taylor, Hunter Meyer, Sean McGowan, Alex Zhao, Boian Etropolski, Robin Goins, Bence Vass, Brian Westerman, Jacob Shwartz-Lucas.

People and Organizations that Advocate for Sentientism and the Elimination of Suffering

David Pearce – Hedweb.com (The Hedonistic Imperative)

Manu Herrán – manuherran.com (Psychological Biases that Impede the Success in the Reduction of Intense Suffering Movement)

Jonathan Leighton – jonathanleighton.org (Why Access to Morphine is a Human Right)

Magnus Vinding – magnusvinding.com (Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications)

Robert Daoust – robert.algosphere.org (Review of Precursor Works)

Jacob Shwartz-Lucas – Invincible Wellbeing (Pleasure in the Brain)

Algosphere Alliance – algosphere.org (Vision)

Organization for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS) – preventsuffering.org (Cluster Headaches and Potential Therapies)

Sentience Research – sentience-research.org (Algonomy)

People and Organizations Aligned with Qualia Formalism

Giulio Tononi – integratedinformationtheory.org (Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul)

Steven Lehar – slehar.com (Harmonic Resonance Theory)

Jonathan W. D. Mason – jwmason.net (Quasi-Conscious Multivariate System)

Johannes Kleiner – jkleiner.de (Mathematical Consciousness Science)

Dan Lloyd – Labyrinth of Consciousness (The Music of Consciousness)

Luca Turin – A Spectroscopic Mechanism for Primary Olfactory Reception (The Science of Scent)

William Marshall – Google Scholar (PyPhi)

Larissa Albantakis – Google Scholar (Causal Composition)

Models of Consciousness Conference – models-of-consciousness.org (YouTube channel)

People and Organizations Aligned with Effective Altruism

Nick Bostrom – nickbostrom.com (What is a Singleton?)

Anders Sandberg – aleph.se (Uriel’s Stacking Problem)

Toby Ord – tobyord.com (The Precipice)

80000 Hours – 80000hours.org (We Could Feed All 8 Billion People Through a Nuclear Winter)

Future of Humanity Institute – fhi.ox.ac.uk (Publications)

Future of Life Institute – futureoflife.org (AI Alignment Podcast: Identity and the AI Revolution with David Pearce and Andrés Gómez Emilsson)

Center on Long-Term Risk – longtermrisk.org (The Case for Suffering-Focused Ethics)

Rethink Priorities – rethinkpriorities.org (Invertebrate Welfare Cause Profile)

Happier Lives Institute – happierlivesinstitute.org (Cause Profile: Mental Health)

Effective Altruism Forum – forum.effectivealtruism.org (Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain)

Rational Psychonautics

Steven Lehar – slehar.com (The Grand Illusion)

James Kent – psychedelic-information-theory.com (The Control Interrupt Model of Psychedelic Action)

Alexander Shulgin – Shulgin Research Institute (Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved)

Thomas S. Ray – Breadth and Depth (Psychedelics and the Human Receptorome)

Matthew Baggott – Beyond Fear: MDMA and Emotion (MDA and Contour Integration)

Psychonaut Wiki – psychonautwiki.org (Visual Effects)

Psychedelic Replications – reddit.com/r/replications (Best of All Times Replications – specific floor tile example)

Great Dharma Teachers

Daniel M. Ingram – Integrated Daniel (No-Self vs. True Self)

Leigh Brasington – leighb.com (Right Concentration)

Shinzen Young – shinzen.org (The Science of Enlightenment)

Culadasa – culadasa.com (Joy and Meditation)

QRI Friends and Supporters

Ryan Ferris and James Ormrod – The Good Timeline (5-MeO-DMT, Paradise Engineering)

Adrian Nelson – Origins of Consciousness (Consciousness Blindness in Science Fiction)

Alex K. Chen – Quora (What are the long term effects of Adderall, Dexedrine, or Ritalin use?)

Andy Vargas – Neologos (Praxis for Open Individualism; Purpose Statement)

Tyger Gruber – tygergruber.com (The Show)

Jacob Lyles – Jacob ex machina (Building a Better Anti-Capitalism)

Adjacent Communities, Organizations, and Allies

Scott Alexander – Slate Start Codex (Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics and the Anarchic Brain)

Geoffrey Miller – Primal Poly (The Mating Mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature)

Zvi Mowshowitz – Don’t Worry About the Vase (More Dakka)

Sarah Constantin – Multiple websites: 1, 2, 3 (More Dakka in Medicine)

Scott Aaronson – scottaaronson.com/blog/ (Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist)

Gwern – gwern.net (Iodine and IQ Meta-Analysis)

Venkatesh Rao – Ribbonfarm (Why We Slouch)

David Chapman – meaningness.com (Romantic Rebellion)

Atman Retreat – atmanretreat.com (FAQ)

Foresight Institute – foresight.org (YouTube Channel)

Convergence Analysis – convergenceanalysis.org (List of Works)

Simulation Series – About (YouTube Channel)

Consciousness Hacking – cohack.org (blog posts)

HeartMath Institute – heartmath.org (Chapter on Coherence)

The Wider World of People Who are Friends and Acquaintances of the QRI Ecosystem

Note: I asked (on social media) our readers to share their blogs and personal sites with us. Some of these links are very aligned with QRI and some are not. That said, together they represent a good sample of the memetic ecosystem that surrounds QRI. Namely, these links can be taken as a whole to be suggestive of “the memetic ground upon which QRI is founded”. Please feel free to share your blog or personal site in the comment section of this post.

Jack Foust – Welcome to the Symbolic Domain

Scott Jackisch – Oakland Futurist (Art as a Superweapon)

Maurits Luyben – Energy and Structure

Anonymous – deluks917 (What does ‘Actually Trying’ look like?)

Sameer Halai – sameerhalai.com (Toilet Paper Shortage is Not Caused by Hoarding)

Yohan John – neurologism.com (Some Wild Speculation On Goodhart’s Law And Its Manifestations In The Brain)

Jamie Joyce – The Society Library (Deconstructing the Logic of “Plandemic”)

João Mirage – YouTube Channel (The Mirror of the Spirit)

Natália Mendonça – Axiomatic Doubts (What Truths are Worth Seeking?)

Dustin Ali Francis Janatpour – Tales From Samarkand (The Inspector and the Crow)

Zarathustra Amadeus Goertzel – zarathustra.gitlab.io (Garden of Minds)

Duncan Sabien – Human Parts (In Defense of Punch Bug)