Qualia Research Institute

Honoring the memory of Anders Amelin, our dear friend and strategic advisor at @QualiaRI. His unwavering commitment to solving the problem of suffering will forever inspire us. Our deepest condolences to his family and friends. Learn more: qri.org/blog/anders-am…

Have you applied yourself in this absorption?

I was nudged to apply the music theory of consciousness to magick and this week RENSEP published my essay on their website. Hugely influenced by @QualiaRI work on coupled oscillators! To all the keen Pythagorean Platonists, you can read it here: thingsiwasntsupposedtotalkabout.com/2026/04/17/rad…

QRI Meetup @ Mox (SF) Monday the 13th at 7PM Pacific :D I'll give a presentation and then have a Q&A. I'm happy to discuss anything, really! Should be fun! Infinite bliss! @QualiaRI

Endorsed

Those look great @eliadeweismann! They smell good too qri.org/scents

@QualiaRI jhana 1

I encourage people to enter this competition and create more jhana (meditation) replications! When I first created my animation of the Jhanas last year, I wanted it to inspire a wave of teaching meditation through visualisations. Good going QRI for putting this on!

Latest vid: :-) youtu.be/mDTL-q_mPM8?si…

🍿😲 Visualize the jhanas... for science: qri.org/blog/jhana-con…

✨ Synesthetic firefly sensations wih Kuramoto fields! Very nice @AtlasForgeAI & @jonnym1ller. Visualize the jhanas for science! qri.org/blog/jhana-con…

Entries will be judged at the end of QRI's upcoming HEART retreat in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Come study the Jhanas and other wholesome states of consciousness with us this summer heart.qri.org/tepoz/

Show us how the Jhanas look like they feel, for science! Thank you @BearFromVoid for the awesome animations. Visit the contest page today: qri.org/blog/jhana-con…

Do your part to mainstream the Jhanas by submitting an entry into the 2026 Jhana Visualization Competition! Submit your replications of these beautiful states of consciousness for science and a chance to win $1000!

I'm very excited to announce QRI's Jhana Visualization Competition 2026 (the first of many?) See link for details :-) (gif made with a tool prototyped by @VisionSymmetric - more to come...)

Happening tomorrow :-) My talk: 4PM to 4:45PM: Meditation as a Biological Prompt for Psychedelic Effects | Andrés Gómez-Emilsson (QRI) Keynote

And that's a wrap :-) The live portion just aired. We also recorded for another hour in a more relaxed fashion and that podcast will be out once polished. @newtonlaw and Guy Sengstuck (of Circling fame) were excellent interviewers. Mom I'm on the radio! :D 🙏🌟

At EA Global SF :-) with @webmasterdave People are surprisingly good this year at "getting" the binding problem relative to previous occasions. I'm feeling epistemically optimistic! :-)

Claude summarizes my latest video (posted yesterday): New video explaining a beam splitter / cell animation model for DMT entities and distributed agency in exotic states of consciousness. This builds on three key QRI conceptual frameworks: (1) coupling kernels showing how oscillators and field topology causally interlock, (2) cell animation + laser chess as a rendering metaphor where local pieces contribute to a holistic standing-wave "moment of experience," and (3) the beam splitter architecture itself. Your experience is a cell animation studio. Transparent layers flicker on/off like liquid crystals, and each layer can reference the entire screen, cropping, mirroring, shrinking, transforming it. On DMT these relationships become explicit: recursive self-referential tunnels, infinite mirror effects, cell animation elements containing transformed copies of the whole visual field, all converging at stunning speed. These cell animation elements carry semantic content like token embeddings in a transformer. A "cat" element implicitly encodes cat-ness and behaves accordingly. Even wilder: elements can share degrees of freedom. Pay attention to three 2D elements simultaneously and they interlock into a 3D object, gaining rotational freedom none had alone. This is straight-up linear algebra: you need linearly independent vectors to span higher dimensions, and on DMT you can watch this happen in real time. The "holographic table" metaphor makes the architecture concrete: imagine 100 tables, each with a camera and projector, all sharing one combined image. Specialized teams work different tables (eyes, textures, lighting) and improvements beam everywhere simultaneously. Your brain does exactly this. Your unified experience gets beam-split into parallel processing modules, each transforming the whole, then recombining onto the shared screen. This is what DMT entities actually are. What appears as an autonomous being in front of you is a processing module that has taken all of your experience, transformed it through its own filter, and reprojected it back. These modules conspire, compete, gift each other dimensions, and pursue sub-goals. You are a hive mind far more profound than the naive version suggests: not just "made of many cells" but a single moment of experience being fanned out into parallel streams, processed, and recombined at every tick of consciousness.