This is more than a presentation. It’s an invitation to join the frontier of consciousness research 🙂

Spatiotemporal Coordinates: Thursday, November 20 – 4:00 PM – 10:00 PM PST – Frontier Tower (San Francisco, California)

Hello Qualia Community!

After a year of heads-down development (with glimpses shared on podcasts including Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal #1  #2) QRI is ready to reveal the full scope of our work mapping the state-space of consciousness, modeling phenomenology, and identifying the computational properties of consciousness. 

What We’ve Recently Accomplished In This Area:

​In 2023, QRI’s High Energy Awareness Research Team conducted two legal psychedelic retreats exploring mushrooms, ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT, by bringing together an interdisciplinary coalition ​of meditators, psychonauts, physicists, and mathematicians and working as a Think Tank for weeks at a time (see heart.qri.org).

Systematic DMT phenomenology reveals repeatable phase transitions and geometric transformations, including hyperbolic curvature, symmetrification effects, and computational properties that demand explanation. The QRI period 2024-2025 has been about developing conceptual frameworks and computational models to make sense of these patterns, and then putting them to empirical test. We’ve discovered how coupling kernels (the rules of interaction between oscillating systems) can simultaneously shape both neural activity and the topological structure of physical fields, providing a potential causal chain from neurochemistry to the structure of conscious experience. It’s a conceptual framework where the pieces of the puzzle finally seem to fit together: how psychedelics modify coupling dynamics at the neural level, how these changes cascade through neural architectures to modulate field topology, and how this field structure feeds back into neural activity, avoiding the trap of epiphenomenalism while grounding phenomenology in processes with computationally meaningful properties.

What’s Next:

​This event is divided into two parts.

• We’ll present the core outputs of our research from the past year: methods, participants, results, and the theoretical frameworks we’ve developed. You’ll see interactive demonstrations and simulations that bring these concepts to life.​
  • 4:00 PM – Doors open, mingling with snacks and soft drinks​
  • 5:00-5:40 – Introductions and interactive demonstrations​
  • 5:40-6:40 – The Big Reveal: QRI’s psychedelic research over the last two years, including HEART retreat results, interactive simulations, and our theoretical breakthroughs
• We’ll chart our path forward: In Q2 2026, we’re planning a legal psychedelic retreat where mathematicians, physicists, meditators, and visual artists will collaborate to test whether non-linear optics plays a role in psychedelic phenomenology (especially DMT). This generative framework, which we take seriously and can rigorously test with proper funding, will combine physics simulations, psychophysics studies, and rigorous phenomenological mapping to reverse engineer the medium of computation of consciousness itself.​
  • 7:00-8:00 – The Next Chapter: 2026 retreat plans, mathematical modeling of consciousness, and testing our generative frameworks​
  • 8:00-9:00 – Q&A and group discussions​
  • 9:00-10:00 – Mingling and winding down

We anticipate that once we recognize consciousness’s computational role, we will move from cognitive science to consciousness engineering: systematically exploring the state-space of possible experiences and recruiting new qualia varieties to enhance our (conscious) cognitive capabilities.

Presenters at this event:

Andrés Gómez-Emilsson: As QRI’s President and Director of Research, his work at QRI ranges from algorithm design, to psychedelic theory, to neurotechnology development, to mapping and studying the computational properties of consciousness. Andrés blogs at qualiacomputing.com.

Cube Flipper: With a deep understanding of wave dynamics and visual perception, Cube is dedicated to uncovering the intricacies of visual phenomena. In addition to their research at QRI, they also share their insights and findings on their personal blog smoothbrains.net.

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What We’re Fundraising For:

To continue this groundbreaking work, we’re seeking support for:

• Core operations: Salaries to keep QRI’s team intact for another year (and hopefully many more)​
• Two major retreats: The 2026 DMT phenomenology retreat and a 5-MeO-DMT awakening retreat
• Research outputs: Publishing papers and studies, including upcoming pain quantification research (currently private, soon to be released)​
• Technology development: Bringing crowdsourced phenomenology visualization tools to a fully functional state to crowd-source the mapping of the state-space of consciousness​ (first batch to be released on November 20th)
• Additional initiatives: Cluster Headache relief research and research in digital sentience (we will announce two QRI-incubated initiatives that further these two causes)

Whether you’re a researcher, artist, meditator, potential funder, or simply fascinated by the nature of consciousness, this event offers a rare opportunity to see cutting-edge phenomenological research as it unfolds. We’re also gauging interest for the 2026 retreat: if you have relevant expertise (mathematics, physics, meditation, visual arts), funding capacity, or alignment with this vision of consciousness research, we’d love to connect.

If you’re unable to make it but would still like to contribute to our research efforts, you can donate at qri.org/donate or with crypto on our Endaoment page.

RSVP to the Event

Technical Appendix: Recent Developments

​This year’s QRI-associated essays reveal multiple converging lines of investigation:

​Non-Linear Optics Framework: A generative framework exploring how the brain might render world simulations using optical elements. Key metaphors include Laser Chess (where local classical moves set constraints, then holistic standing wave patterns emerge) and Cel Animation (describing how the world simulation is constructed with independent layers controlled by different modules that overlap and interact in a shared perceptual workspace). This includes work on beamsplitter holography to explain Indra’s Net phenomenology.

​Fractional Fourier Transform: Recent work explores how the brain may *utilize* the fractional Fourier transform, which is a generalization that smoothly interpolates between spatial and frequency domains. This could explain characteristic ringing artifacts in psychedelic visual fields and provide a biologically plausible mechanism for massively parallel pattern recognition.

Coupling Kernels and CDNS and Field Topology: A breakthrough framework showing how systems of coupled oscillators can both tune into resonant modes and control the topological structure of fields. This provides a direct causal chain from molecular interactions (neurotransmitters, psychedelics) to the structure of conscious experience. The coupling kernel acts as a “field-shaping operator”, the same mathematical object simultaneously modulates neural dynamics and field structure, explaining how psychedelics produce such radically different yet structurally consistent effects across participants and experiences. We hypothesize that DMT effectively implements a Mexican-hat coupling profile (strong negative coupling at short distances, positive at medium distances) creating competing clusters of coherence, while 5-MeO-DMT drives systems toward global phase synchronization. This connects to the Consonance-Dissonance-Noise Signature (CDNS) approach, which describes valence in terms of spectral properties such as consonance tracking positive valence, dissonance negative valence, and noise neutral valence. We we will make the case for why this proof-of-concept demonstrations are compelling and point toward testable predictions.

​Ongoing Foundational Work: QRI continues to develop frameworks including the CDNS approach, the Topological Solution to the Boundary Problem (explaining how unified experiences emerge with precise boundaries), liquid crystal dynamics as phenomenologically significant, and logarithmic scales of pleasure and pain for rigorous quantification of experiential quality.

Catch up on the latest:

Binding, Minds & the Platonic Realm: Michael Levin, Andres Gomez Emilsson & Elan Barenholtz

How Networks Vibrate: From Oscillators to Eigenmodes

A Salon on Consciousness, Holograms, and Digital Psychedelics

Different Types of Artificial Minds: Digital, Analogue, and Hybrid

The Future of Consciousness: Consciousness and What It Means to Continue to Be

DMT for Cluster Headaches: Aborting and Preventing Extreme Pain with Tryptamines and Other Methods

Learn more:

• ​Qualia Research Institute: qri.org​
• HEART: heart.qri.org
• Andrés’ blog: qualiacomputing.com
• ​Cube Flipper’s Blog: smoothbrains.net