Qualia Research Institute community meetup: qualia pub quiz & unconference

​​​​Qualia Research Institute is a non-profit building a science of consciousness to improve lives of sentient beings. This is an unofficial informal meetup for the community around QRI in London.

​​Come if you are interesting in understanding consciousness, psychedelics, meditation, neuroscience, neurotechnology, spirituality.

​The meetup will consist of two parts:
— a pub* quiz on QRI-related topics such as psychedelics, consciousness, philosophy of mind
— an unconference: a participant-driven conference with a write-in schedule on the wall where anyone suggest a topic

​*not actually held in a pub

​Qualia Pub* Quiz

​The pub* quiz will be on a number of QRI-related topics: psychedelics, consciousness, philosophy of mind. Anything from science and philosophy to arts and culture.

​Expect a mix of trivia and conceptual questions: some will test your knowledge, some will require you to think. Some harder questions will require both knowledge and thinking.

​Expect a mix of general questions and questions about QRI's work. There will be a fair amount of questions about QRI's own work, but the vast majority of them will either be solvable with only the information contained in the questions or contain enough information for you to take a good guess if it's a multiple-choice question. Having a QRI fan on your team will provide you some advantage, but the explicit goal of the question set is to balance out this advantage to not be a decisive one. The rule of thumb for balancing this question set is something like: if we formed two hypothetical teams, one of the most avid QRI fans who came to the meetup and another one of most smart & knowledgeable meetup attendees, it shouldn't be immediately obvious which team would win. And you can also prepare for the QRI-related questions in advance.

​Feel free to form your team in advance or during the start of the event (after the doors open but before the quiz begins). We can also assign you a team on the day. The recommended team size is 4-8 people. If you are forming a team in advance, please let me know this by RSVPing to this event and then replying to the automatic email confirmation you receive.

​Phone use is not allowed during the quiz.

​* not actually held in a pub. But the vibes will be better because of the following unconference. And feel free to BYOB to make the experience more authentic!

​Unconference

​The quiz will be followed by unconference, a participant-driven conference with write-in schedule on the wall. Anyone who wants to initiate a discussion on a topic can claim a time and a space. We had several unconferences in the last 1.5 years, so might've been to one already — this one will have a similar format. The unconference topics can be any of the general QRI topics: consciousness research, psychedelics, meditation, neuroscience, philosophy.

​That said, you can also simply come and hang out with people — unconference is there to give some structure and help like-minded people find each other.

​Schedule

​19:00 Doors open, socialising, forming teams for the pub* quiz, preparing unconference sessions
19:30 a qualia pub* quiz on psychedelics, consciousness, philosophy of mind
20:20: the quiz ends, hanging out, socialising, preparing unconference sessions
20:30 till late: unconference & socialising

​* well you should know what the asterisk means by now