Qualia Research Institute
| Abbreviation | QRI |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2018 |
| Type | Independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization |
| Founders | Andrés Gómez Emilsson, Michael Edward Johnson, and Romeo Stevens |
| Focus | Consciousness, emotional valence, phenomenology, and neurotechnology |
| Key person | Andrés Gómez Emilsson (president and director of research) |
| Website | qri.org |
The Qualia Research Institute (QRI) is an American independent nonprofit research organization founded in 2018. It develops mathematical and empirical approaches to consciousness, with particular attention to emotional valence—the pleasantness or unpleasantness of experience—and altered states of consciousness. QRI describes its mission as developing a precise mathematical language for subjective experience, understanding valence, mapping the space of possible conscious states, and building technologies intended to improve the lives of sentient beings.[1]
QRI operates outside a university and combines theoretical work, phenomenological reports, psychophysics, neuroimaging, and exploratory neurotechnology. Its program is closely connected to abolitionist and transhumanist concerns about reducing suffering, but several of its best-known ideas remain hypotheses rather than established theories in neuroscience.
History and organization
QRI was incorporated in 2018 by Andrés Gómez Emilsson, Michael Edward Johnson, and Romeo Stevens. An institutional history published in 2021 described Johnson and Gómez Emilsson as co-directors of research, with Andrew Zuckerman as executive director and a small interdisciplinary team working in engineering, psychology, neuroscience, and phenomenology.[2] Johnson, whose 2016 monograph Principia Qualia supplied several of QRI's founding concepts, left the organization in 2022.[3]
Gómez Emilsson subsequently became QRI's president and director of research. The institute identifies itself as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and uses a think-tank model intended to support lines of inquiry that may be difficult to pursue within conventional academic incentives.[1] Its published descriptions emphasize collaboration with academic and independent researchers, although QRI is not itself a university department or degree-granting institution.
Research program
QRI's central methodological commitment is qualia formalism: the hypothesis that the structure of any conscious experience can, in principle, be represented by a corresponding mathematical object. A related idea, valence structuralism, proposes that how good or bad an experience feels is determined by a structural property of that representation rather than by a particular neurotransmitter, brain region, or behavioral function alone.[4]
The institute's best-known proposal within this program is the Symmetry Theory of Valence (STV). First articulated by Johnson in Principia Qualia, STV proposes that the valence of a conscious state corresponds to the symmetry of its mathematical representation. Gómez Emilsson later developed phenomenological interpretations, possible counterexamples, neural conjectures, and proposed empirical tests.[5]
QRI also studies altered states produced by psychedelics and meditation. Gómez Emilsson's essay The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences used first-person reports to propose a geometric model of recurring visual and spatial features reported under DMT. QRI has developed a psychophysics toolkit for recreating and comparing visual effects, and its current website presents phenomenological reporting and interactive modeling tools as part of its research practice.[1] These approaches treat reports as potential data about the structure of experience while recognizing that a phenomenological model is not by itself a demonstrated neural mechanism.
Publications and empirical work
Parts of QRI's research program have appeared in peer-reviewed journals. Gómez Emilsson and Chris Percy formulated the "slicing problem" for computational theories of consciousness, arguing that a physical computation may permit multiple arbitrary divisions into candidate conscious systems.[6] They later proposed topological segmentation in electromagnetic fields as a possible response to the boundary problem for consciousness.[7]
Their heavy-tailed valence hypothesis proposes that the intensity of pleasure and pain may vary across a much wider range than is represented by ordinary bounded rating scales. A pilot survey of 97 adults produced tentative evidence for the hypothesis while also identifying substantial measurement limitations and the need for replication.[8] Percy and Gómez Emilsson have also examined whether a dynamic interpretation of integrated information theory can address the phenomenal binding problem.[9]
Transhumanist relevance and assessment
QRI translates the transhumanist objective of improving well-being into questions about measuring and engineering conscious states. If valence could be measured independently of verbal report or species-specific behavior, such a measure could affect mental-health research, animal welfare, the evaluation of possible artificial minds, and proposals to eliminate suffering. This places QRI near the intellectual tradition of David Pearce and The Hedonistic Imperative, while giving greater emphasis to formal models and neurotechnology.
The institute's work should be distinguished by evidential status. Its boundary and heavy-tailed-valence papers state testable hypotheses and limitations, whereas qualia formalism and STV remain broader theoretical commitments without direct, generally accepted validation. QRI's significance within transhumanism therefore lies both in its specific proposals and in its attempt to turn questions about the quality of experience into a technical research program.
See also
External links
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Qualia Research Institute, official website. Retrieved 15 August 2026.
- ↑ Qualia Research Institute: History & 2021 Strategy, Qualia Research Institute, 25 January 2021.
- ↑ About Michael Edward Johnson, OpenTheory. Retrieved 15 August 2026.
- ↑ Research Lineages, Qualia Research Institute. Retrieved 15 August 2026.
- ↑ The Symmetry Theory of Valence 2020 Overview, Qualia Research Institute, 17 December 2020.
- ↑ The “Slicing Problem” for Computational Theories of Consciousness, Open Philosophy, 5, 2022.
- ↑ Don't Forget the Boundary Problem!, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 17, 2023.
- ↑ The Heavy-Tailed Valence Hypothesis, Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 2023.
- ↑ Integrated Information Theory and the Phenomenal Binding Problem, Entropy, 27(4), 2025.