Building a Science of Consciousness

Normally in meditation we are focused on what IS in experience, but to be able to notice the absence of phenomena is key as well! Where there once were qualia, now there aren’t - what does that reveal to us about their nature?Roger Thisdell guides a meditation starting with a taste session on the major ingredients which make up our experience. Then after paying attention to these components, we deliberately try to not pay attention to them. What we find is the move to let go of paying attention to anything is a universal move - no matter the object of attention - how convenient!The ability to take attention off of more and more aspects of experience is an essential skill which eventually culminates in the ability to not pay attention to time,space and consciousness, resulting in cessation.For more guided meditations by Roger, check out his Patreon page where he releases a new guided meditation, on a variety of techniques, every week: https://www.patreon.com/rogerthis

Metta is a Pali word that can be translated as benevolence, friendliness, or good will. It is a key state of mind for meditative practice; it has the capacity to heal, invigorate, and center the mind.The majority of guided Metta meditations emphasize the ways in which you can trigger this state of mind with semantic content and imagery. For example imagining a loved one, a pet, or even a beautiful scene, and tuning into the feeling of friendliness that such an image sparks.In this meditation we instead emphasize the phenomenal character of Metta as a way to develop it, establish it, and understand it deeply. For example, we discuss how one can use different varieties of attention in order to kindle this feeling. We also tune into one’s intentions and background mood in order to nudge the mind towards Metta. More so, we carefully study how technical phenomenological features such as rhythm, wave envelope, and energy affects the quality and intensity of Metta.May this meditation be of benefit to sentient beings!Relevant Links:Metta Practice, and a few things about Piti (Instructions), by Rob Burbea (https://dharmaseed.org/talks/60871/)Guide to Writing Rigorous Reports of Exotic States of Consciousness (https://qri.org/blog/rigorous-reports)Guided Meditation: The Varieties of Attention (https://youtu.be/YYSkKgwH4Bg?si=okgPbqKSGt8MvIHq)Buddhist Annealing: Wireheading Done Right with the Seven Factors of Awakening (https://qualiacomputing.com/2021/04/04/buddhist-annealing-wireheading-done-right-with-the-seven-factors-of-awakening/)Metta: The Fabric Softener of Reality (https://youtu.be/SN-Wfk8bYo0?si=jpSS3lYSvOR6V-7P)

There are many spiritual and yogic practices that utilize “elemental” objects of meditation. For example, the guided meditation by Michael Taft called “Five Elements Meditation” (link below) centers the mind around mental formations evocative of earth, water, fire, air, and space. Alas, it is natural to be skeptical of the value of these practices on the basis that science has shown that the universe is made up of particles, forces, and fields, and not the traditional elements of ancient ontologies.Nevertheless, within the paradigm of Qualia Mastery in meditation, we affirm the significance of specific states of consciousness, irrespective of the techniques used to induce them. Adhering rigidly to a modern scientific worldview might, in fact, impede one's engagement with such meditative practices. Engaging fully with a meditation that posits, for instance, fire as a fundamental entity, can often yield richer results when one genuinely subscribes to the idea. Continual internal rebuttals, such as "fire isn't foundational; electrons are!" can inhibit deep immersion into these states.So how can we rescue what is valuable from this style of meditation without having to buy into an implicit “elemental ontology”? Here is where the relevance of “self-organizing principles” comes into play. Namely, where we realize that the nervous system is capable of instantiating a cornucopia of diverse self-organizing principles that are used to render one’s inner world-simulation. Thus, when you imagine and embody “the element of fire” you are, in a way, instantiating a collection of self-organizing principles that roughly emulate the behavior of fire. Therefore, we can use a more generalized conception of “elemental meditation” as a window into these self-organizing principles. This is what this meditation does.Relevant Links:Five Elements Meditation by Michael Taft (https://www.youtube.com/live/p_1BPl39orA?si=uyF-hcVoDKp3IWgW)Digital Sentience Requires Solving the Boundary Problem, where the computational properties of self-organizing principles are discussed (https://qri.org/blog/digital-sentience)

This meditation explores the phenomenology of absorption into Platonic objects. We delve into what it feels like to imagine, embody, and generate the sense of knowing of classic geometric and mathematical constructs.One of the main takeaways from this meditation is that we can attune to the difference between (1) how we render a particular instance of a Platonic object and (2) the sense of knowing and existence of that object that arises as we do so.That is, (1) emphasizes the specific point of view from which a Platonic object (say, a cube) can be apprehended. Each point of view gives rise to, in a way, a completely different experience (cf. Borges’ Funes the Memorious). Namely, the experience of rendering such an object from that particular point of view, with all of the sensory and qualitative features that come along with it. In contrast (2) points to that which remains the same across all of these points of view. Namely, the ways in which holding these objects in one’s attention keeps aspects of our experience invariant (such as the intuitions and resonances that come with each particular Platonic object).In addition, we also explore how the geometry of attention affects one’s valence and sense of ease, with the goal of naturalizing “Sacred Geometry” for the cultivation of Qualia Mastery.Relevant Links:On Dark Rooms, Jhanas, Ecstasy, and the Symmetry Theory of Valence (https://qualiacomputing.com/2021/10/31/on-dark-rooms-jhanas-ecstasy-and-the-symmetry-theory-of-valence/)Guided Meditation: The Varieties of Attention (https://youtu.be/YYSkKgwH4Bg?si=okgPbqKSGt8MvIHq)

In this meditation, Roger Thisdell guides us in a meditation of somatic scanning up and down the body using concurrent waves of awareness that pass through one another. We are trying to balance both the sense of grounding, stability with the sense of wakeful, levity.By the end of the meditation, the goal is to isolate and metacognize the sense of ‘becoming’ within experience, and notice that this signal is always presenting itself. We may question, if everything seems like it’s always ‘becoming’ (but never fully become), then what significance does this have with the goal of trying to have ‘arrived’ somewhere?For more guided meditations by Roger, check out his Patreon page where he releases a new guided meditation, on a variety of techniques, every week: https://www.patreon.com/rogerthis

In this guided meditation, Andrés will take you through QRI's recent work, focusing on two key aspects:The Thermodynamics of Consciousness: This part of the meditation will explore how energy flows from various sources such as sensory stimulation, valence, attention, surprise, and the background noise signature. This energy is directed towards the bound field of consciousness, which is then shaped via the energy sink landscape of symmetry and recognition. Finally, the processed consciousness exits through motor action or what is referred to as "outer field radiation."The Ecosystem of Agents: Drawing a parallel to next-token prediction engines like GPT-4, this part of the meditation will explain how our minds work similarly, where existing constraints help resolve ambiguity in our experiences. To make accurate predictions of the world, our minds simulate agentive behavior because the world is full of agents. To achieve this, "subagents" are created to play the role of agentive forces, which can be predicted to ensure safety.Throughout the meditation, you will explore a series of strategies to deal with these subagents and harmonize them within a healthy and wholesome ecosystem of friendly subagents that help each other in beautiful ways. Some of these strategies include:Improving the training data for subagents.Guiding lost subagents to a pool of love to re-absorb them.Cultivating good vibes as a base to provide evolutionary selection pressures for friendly agents to arise.Emphasizing equanimity and metta to reward clean intentions rather than flattery.Exploring different network structures for agents that are more easily manageable.By engaging in these practices, you can create a harmonious and beneficial ecosystem of subagents within your mind.

In this guided meditation, Andrés will lead you through a series of exercises that illustrate harmonic resonance in the energy body. Subsequently, excess energy will be channeled into high-valence tactile sensations (resembling Piti), which can serve as a potential foundational practice for the 1st Jhana.The meditation primarily focuses on the inner and outer "feel" channels of the (see, hear, feel) X (inner, outer) formulation of the "factorization experience," as introduced by Shinzen Young in his Unified Mindfulness framework. When necessary, feel free to use the inner and outer "see" channel for support, but keep the "feel" channel as the primary point of focus. During this meditation, we will explore the following types of oscillations:On/offLeft/rightTop/bottomFront/backExpand/contractToroidal flow (up, down, both at once)Checkerboard patternZebra patternHomogenous attention in spaceSpace qualities: solid, liquid, magnetic, viscosity, gaseous, plasmaPleasure, joy, peaceLaminal flow and energy management techniquesPrior to attempting this meditation, it is advisable to listen to the guided meditations on Energy, Attention, and Valence from the Qualia Mastery series.

In this guided meditation, Andrés will assist you in exploring how attention constructs local binding connections between phenomenal features, and how the flow of attention and awareness can be likened to the graph algorithm called PageRank.Topics covered in the meditation include:Reviewing the nature of attention: what you pay attention to becomes stronger, gets locally bound, and connects to what you were paying attention to right before.Noticing local binding in the experiences of See, Hear, and Feel (both inner and outer).Cross-modal coupling: employing the divide and conquer technique to prevent negative valence and the coherence technique to enhance positive valence.Understanding the oscillatory complementarity between awareness and attention.Recognizing how objects of perception can act as witnesses and witnessed elements of a scene.Exploring hybrid attentional modes.Investigating chains of witnessing and Nth-order intentionality.Examining the concept of PageRank applied to attention.Delving into space witnessing space.These techniques and insights are valuable additions to your Qualia Mastery* toolkit.

In this guided meditation, Andrés will lead you through a transformative journey that includes the following elements:A factorization of experience into three main channels with their corresponding inner and outer versions: "see," "hear," and "feel."Utilizing your energy body as an antenna capable of perceiving both shapes and frequencies of internal representations, exploring the duality between form and vibration in the phenomenal world.Understanding symmetry and smooth geometry as the fundamental basis for valence.Recognizing consonance, dissonance, and noise as tools to assess the valence of our world-simulation.Learning a variety of practical strategies to address phenomenal dissonance effectively.Enjoy this profound exploration!Relevant links/references:High-Valence Meditation - https://qualiacomputing.com/2021/12/03/high-valence-meditation/Michael Johnson's Principia Qualia - Introduction to the Symmetry Theory of Valence, valence structuralism, and qualia formalism - https://opentheory.net/principia-qualia/The Consonance Disonance Noise Signature framework first introduced by Andrés Gómez Emilsson in Quantifying Bliss - https://qri.org/blog/quantifying-blissThe Symmetry Theory of Valence (@The Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London) - https://youtu.be/tSPZ4xt5f2kNeural Annealing by Michael Johnson - https://

This is a guided meditation provided by Andrés in order to enrich one's conception of the nature of "attention". Attention is typically thought of as a fuzzy "spotlight" that redirects cognitive resources to a region of one's experience. But this is just one of many varieties of attention. In fact, many changes to one's state of consciousness have very little to do with changes to perceptual features like color, brightness, auditory pitch, tactile sensations, or the texture of thought. At times, one can tell that one's state of consciousness has changed dramatically and yet it is very hard to pin-point exactly what that change consists of. In many of those cases, that's because the change is primarily attentional. Thus, learning about alternative modes of attention is an important tool to enable higher quality phenomenological reports and replications. It has the added bonus that knowing a broad range of attentional modes can radically enhance one's meditation practice. Join us in this guided meditation to get acquainted with a much broader set of attentional modes.

In this episode, we explore the similarities between the brain and a musical instrument. We illustrate how the brain tissue is represented by metal and how brain activity can be mimicked by sound. We also demonstrate how substances such as psychedelics and dissociatives can be used to alter brain activity. This model is based on the fact that both sound and neuronal firing are examples of oscillatory activity which can have different frequency, amplitude, coherence, and damping.

In this episode, we explore the idea of emergent simplicity - the idea that adding just one extra component to a complex system can cause it to "tip" into a drastically simpler state. We use the example of adding carbon dioxide to the Earth, which would cause the Earth to become a much simpler system where neither life nor liquid water would exist. We also use the example of adding 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyl tryptamine to the human brain, which would cause the brain to become a much simpler system where neither selfhood nor agency would exist.