Qualia Research Institute Community Meetup & Unconference

​​Qualia Research Institute is non-profit building a science of consciousness to improve lives of sentient beings.

​​Come if you are interesting in understanding consciousness, psychedelics, meditation, neuroscience, neurotechnology, spirituality, the nature of pleasure and pain.

We'll have soft drinks and snacks. And we're encouraging you to bring your own.

The main format is unconference — a participant-driven conference. This is the same format as the previous meetup: the agenda is created by the attendees at the beginning of the meeting. Anyone who wants to initiate a discussion on a topic can claim a time and a space. Feel free to think in advance what kind of sessions or workshops you'd like to run and prepare for them.

​That said, you can also simply come and hang out with people — unconference is there to give some structure and help people find interesting discussions.

Schedule
7:00 PM. The meetup starts. Socializing
7:30 PM. Unconference starts
8:00 PM. [optional] Qualia of the Day sharing
9:00..11:30 PM. Socializing

Encouraged: bring a fun or unusual experience with you. This could be a perfume, a poem, a dance, or whatever you like. This is in the spirit of the "Qualia of the Day" tradition, where Andrés always starts a video by sharing a novel and peculiar experience.

Potential topics for discussion
— Psychedelics. What do exotic states of consciousness can tell us about it? From models of how they work (e. g. QRI's neural annealing) to writing rigorous trip reports to personal experiences.
— Meditation. Why does it work? What does it say about the consciousness? What does Buddhism get right?
— AI consciousness and sentience. The binding (boundary) problem.
— Valence. The nature of pleasure and pain. Why do some experiences feel better than others? Symmetry Theory of Valence.
— Logarithmic scales of pleasure and pain. How much worse are the worst experiences? How much better are the best experiences?
— Formal theories of consciousness. How do we create one? What do we want from a theory of consciousness? Is IIT a pseudoscience?
— Whatever you come up with!

PS: this is a unofficial community meetup