event

Announcing: QUALIUS Retreat in Crete (July 10-14, 2025)

Posted on by algekalipso

I’m excited to announce QUALIUS, an upcoming post-ASSC retreat on the topic of non-ordinary states of consciousness, taking place July 10–14, 2025, in Ligres, Crete. Organized by the ALIUS and QRI, the retreat will bring together researchers working at the intersection of psychometrics, VR, computational modeling, and contemplative practice. It’s structured around four thematic tracks: measuring subjective effects, studying altered states using virtual reality, integrating lived experience into consciousness research, and formalizing the structure of non-ordinary states. QRI is helping with support for the retreat and by leading the fourth track, contributing our latest tools and frameworks for modeling the fine-grained structure of experience. Our approach emphasizes the phenomenal character of states of consciousness—the texture and structure of experience—over the intentional content, or what the experience is about. Conceptual tools like the Guide to Writing Rigorous Reports of Exotic States of Consciousness and software tools like the QRI’s Tracer Tool give a flavor of our methodology, but we’ll be showcasing more advanced, unpublished systems currently being integrated into active studies.

This post-ASSC 2025 satellite event will serve as an interdisciplinary workshop retreat to advance research on consciousness, altered states, and computational phenomenology. It will integrate perspectives from neuroscience, VR, computational modeling, and philosophy, fostering collaboration among researchers with a shared interest in non-ordinary conscious states. A key focus will be on the measurement of subjective effects in altered states research, exploring innovative experiential approaches using VR to induce and study these phenomena. The workshop will also highlight neurophenomenological methods that bridge first-person experience with third-person data, particularly at the intersections of art and neuroscience. Through focused discussions, cross-disciplinary talks, and collaborative sessions, participants will explore formal models of consciousness, including mathematical frameworks and neural modeling approaches. The workshop aims to establish a long-term research consortium, promoting sustainable partnerships and open collaboration to bridge empirical and theoretical perspectives in the study of altered states.
The retreat is designed as a smaller, more intimate gathering of around 35 researchers with a shared interest in altered states of consciousness. Unlike the main conference, which primarily focuses on published work, this retreat will emphasize ongoing and future research, fostering discussions that lead to new collaborations. The aim is to create a space where researchers can connect organically, exchange ideas, and explore potential synergies—whether intellectual, financial, or infrastructural—through a bottom-up approach driven by participant interactions and shared interests.
– QUALIUS: ASSC Sattelite Event on Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness

Acknowledgements

Thanks to George Fejer for coming up with this initiative and offering to collaborate with QRI. Thanks to Till Holzapfel for introducing us and suggesting collaboration possibilities (and everyone who recently participated in the QRI Meetup in Amsterdam, many of whom will be joining this event!).

The retreat is made possible by the assembly of an extraordinary team across four research tracks:

Track 1 – Measuring Subjective Effects (organized by Timo Torsten Schmidt and Cyril Costines, see: CIRCE). This track develops open-science strategies for capturing and comparing altered states using validated psychometrics and large-scale data platforms.

Track 2 – Virtual Reality for Altered States (Curated by Keisuke Suzuki, Pawel Motyka, and George Fejer). This track explores how VR and cybernetic feedback systems can induce, modulate, and investigate non-ordinary experiences. Includes contributions from the Viscereality Project.

Track 3 – Lived Experience in Consciousness Research (by Mar Estaralles and Jonas Mago), which explores how introspection, contemplative practice, and lived first-person perspectives can be integrated into rigorous consciousness research.

And QRI collaborators working on Track 4 – Formalizing the Non-Ordinary State Space (full list of collaborators TBA soon). This fourth track focuses on computational and phenomenological modeling of non-ordinary states. We’ll explore how structural features of experience can be visualized, compared, and potentially modulated, and how to integrate these replications into rigorous studies.

We’re grateful to the ALIUS Research Group for setting up this event, ASSC for accepting the retreat as an official satellite event of the conference, and to the broader consciousness research community for cultivating a space where formal theory, lived experience, and empirical investigation can converge.

If your work lives in this space (or if you’d like it to) consider applying today.

Infinite bliss!
Andrés 🙂

Cause X – What Will the New Shiny Effective Altruist Cause Be?

Posted on by algekalipso

The Qualia Research Institute hosted an interesting event a couple of weeks ago. Here is how the event was advertised:

Description

Event Name: QRI & Friends: “Cause X” – what will the new shiny EA cause be?
Time: Saturday, January 19, 2019 at 4 PM – 1 AM
Description: This event will consist of 4-minute presentations from attendees about what the “new EA cause area should be” (from 4pm to 6pm) followed by a casual and chill hangout for the rest of the evening.
There are 10 slots for the presentations, and we encourage you to sign up for one before they run out. If you want to give a presentation please fill out this form: [deleted link]
If you want to see people’s presentations please show up before 4:15pm (we will start the presentations at 4:30 sharp). Each participant will be given 4 minutes to present and 1 minute for Q&A. We will be strict on time. You should come prepared to defend your cause with logic, data, etc.
Everyone who sees the presentations will get to vote* at the end for the following three categories:
  1. Most likely to prevent as much suffering as possible with 1 million dollars of funding
  2. Most fun to think about
  3. Most likely to be the plan of a super-villain
There will be real prizes for each of these three categories!!!**
If you just want to come and hang out for the evening please show up from 6:30pm onwards. Vegetarian/vegan food and drinks will be served at around 7:30pm. Feel free to bring vegan/vegetarian food/drinks too.
As usual, feel free to invite people who are curious about consciousness and EA (but please let me know in advance so I can make a head-count for the event).
*Voting was carried out with Approval Voting (where every person can vote for as many presentations as they want and the ones with the highest number of votes win). This was chosen based on the assumption that some presentations might be similar, which would lead to an unfair penalty on similar presentations based on the spoiler effect. Additionally, voters who are undecided between more than one presentation can communicate their uncertainty via this type of voting rather than having that useful information be discarded.
**Prizes were announced the day of the event. For category (1) the prizes were “a fully-equipped first-aid kit plus a 16-bottle essential oils kit”. The winner of category (2) received a prize consisting of “a 3D Mirascope and an Ivy Cube“. And category (3) had as its prize an “Apollo Tools 39 piece general tool set (DT9706)“. These prizes were, of course, highly symbolic of their respective categories.

Winners

With the permission of the participants, here is what each of the winners presented:

For (1) two presenters tied in first place:

– Natália Mendonça presented about “Using smartphones to improve well-being measures in order to aid cause prioritization research” (link to presentation). She argued that the experience sampling paradigms that made waves in the 2000s and early 2010s happened at a time when relatively few people had smartphones. Since today smartphone adoption in developing countries has exploded we could use an experience sampling app to determine the major causes of suffering throughout the world in a way that wasn’t possible before. She specifically mentioned “comparing how bad different illnesses feel” in order to help us guide policy decision for cause prioritization.
– An anonymous attendee presented about “Psychedelic Drug Decriminalization“. Some of the core ideas involved taking a look at the effect sizes of the benefits of MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, etc. on various mental illnesses and comparing them against current alternatives. Also looking at the potential downsides they estimated that these only account for about 10% of the benefit, so cost-benefit wise it is very positive. They didn’t cover the entire presentation due to time – more details and a contact email can be found at https://enthea.net.

For (2) the winner was:

– Matthew Barnet who presented about “Timeloop Concept as Cause X” (link – slides don’t have much content; they were used just to keep the presentation on track). Matthew looked at the recent Qualia Computing article about the “Pseudo-Time Arrow” and wondered whether the importance of agents from an ethical point of view should be weighted at least in part based on their subjective time-structure. It’s true that 99% of experiences are experienced as having a linear causal time arrow, but this is not the case for the general space of possible experiences (e.g. including “moments of eternity”, “time loops”, “atemporal states”, etc. common on altered states of consciousness). He posited that perhaps time loop experiences have a much bigger moral importance because from the inside it feels like they never end. A discussion about infinite ethics and the quantification of consciousness ensued.

For (3) the winner was:

– Yev Barkalov, who proposed that rather than trying to endlessly battle in favor of digital privacy… how about we “just give up” and instead refocus the absence of digital privacy for social good. He mentioned China’s social credit score as a possible bad implementation of what he had in mind (“they have poisoned the well of the no-privacy camp by doing it so poorly”). Part of his argument was that technologies such as adblockers, crypto tokens, and the dark net further arms races in which advertisers, financial institutions, and governments become more clever at displaying ads, making you sign up for credit cards, and forcing citizens to abide by the law. Since arms races are dangerous and may lead to draconian systems while also being a waste of resources (due to their zero-sum nature), he suggested that we at least consider the alternative of seeing how a privacy-less world could work in practice. He posited that this could allow people to find quality collaborators more easily thanks to enhanced “people search” capabilities made available to the general population.
For completeness, the remaining presentations included:
– Open Individualism as a new foundation for ethics
– Collective internet identities to replace countries
– The researching of possible Cause Xs as itself Cause X
– Automatic Truth Discovery neo-Wikipedia: like the current Wikipedia but with meta-analytic tools embedded into it, which provide confidence intervals for each claim based on the statistical robustness of the empirical findings that support it. And…
– A critique of utilitarianism that was more of a rant than a specific proposal (???)

Finally, I would like to add here some additional possible Causes X that I have thought about. These did not participate in the event because the organizers were not allowed to present (due to fairness and also because I didn’t want to “win a prize” that I bought myself):

  1. Subsidizing/sponsoring the use of HEPA filters in every house
  2. Distributing DMT vape pens that dispense in 4mg doses to deal with unexpected cluster headaches (this deserves an article of its own; cf. “Hell Must Be Destroyed“)
  3. Building a model that takes in genetic data and returns hedonic set point (and/or tells you which recreational drugs you are most likely to respond positively to).

In brief, (1) above might be a highly effective way of improving the health-span of a country’s population in a cost-effective fashion. As Robin Hanson has argued over the years, if we truly cared about the health of people, we would be spending more resources on the top 4 drivers of health (diet, exercise, sleep, and clean air) rather than on extravagant medical interventions designed to convince us that “an attempt was made.” Clean air, in particular, seems easy to influence at a rather minimal cost. HEPA filters capable of providing clean air to entire apartments (reducing by 10X the PM2.5 concentrations in the apartment) can cost as little as $70, with an upkeep of about $30 a year for renewing filters, and about $20 a year for electricity. Fermi calculation would indicate this would cut the average person’s daily PM2.5 exposure by half. I haven’t worked out the math concerning the amount of micromorts prevented per dollar this way, but the numbers seem extremely promising.

For (2) the rationale is that inhaling tiny doses of DMT aborts a cluster headache within about 3 seconds. Given the fact that about 0.1% of people will suffer from a cluster headache at least once in their lifetimes, and the fact that they are considered one of the most painful experiences possible, having a DMT vape pen within reach at all times as an insurance against spontaneous hellish levels of pain might be perfectly justified. A dedicated article about this specific topic will be posted soon.

And finally, (3) was recently argued in a Qualia Computing article: Triple S Genetic Counseling: Predicting Hedonic-Set Point with Commercial-Grade DNA Testing as an Effective Altruist Project. This may very well be a defensible Cause X on the basis that building such a model is already possible with the data available to commercial DNA testing companies like 23andMe, and that it might course-correct the reproductive strategy of millions of prospective parents within a few years, preventing untold amounts of suffering at a relatively small cost.