Principia Qualia

gist

Michael Edward Johnson's Principia Qualia proposes that an experience's pleasantness is the symmetry of a mathematical object isomorphic to it. He finds the neuroscience of pain and pleasure narrow and often circular, and Integrated Information Theory promising but flawed. He splits a full theory of consciousness into eight subproblems across metaphysics, math and interpretation. Treating valence as a crisp, measurable quantity, he offers testable predictions: pleasant brain states should compress better on EEG, and harmonious music with synchronized vagus nerve stimulation should feel best. This link serves the 2023 edition of the 2016 paper.

ideas

• A theory of consciousness splits into eight subproblems. Reality mapping and substrate; boundary, scale, topology of information and state space; vocabulary and translation.
• Valence looks messy only from the wrong level. Johnson treats it as a crisp property of conscious states that we can measure, not a fuzzy high-level construction.
• Symmetry of the qualia object is proposed as pleasantness. Candidate measures include symmetry-group size, compressibility and fuzzy graph-symmetry detection; anti-symmetry and dissonance sit at the negative pole.
• Pleasant brain states should compress better. A proposed test adapts Casali et al.'s TMS-EEG "zap and zip" complexity index while controlling for degree of consciousness.
• Interpretation can proceed apart from the math. Translating math into phenomenology is largely orthogonal to how the object is built, inviting a bazaar instead of silos.

quotes