Valence Realism, Consciousness & AI - Andrés Gómez Emilsson

Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, director of research at the Qualia Research Institute (QRI) discusses valence realism, the mathematics of consciousness, and what all this might mean for AI alignment and the long-term future of sentient life. Valence realism, as QRI uses the term, is the claim that for any given conscious state there is a mind-independent fact of the matter about how good or bad it feels overall – even when our verbal reports or surface preferences disagree. Gómez-Emilsson situates valence realism within “qualia formalism”: the hypothesis that every conscious experience corresponds to a specific mathematical object, such that the structure of that object is isomorphic to the structure of the experience. On this view, consciousness is not ineffable mush; it has a precise, if currently unknown, mathematical description. From there QRI develops “valence structuralism”: the idea that the pleasantness or unpleasantness of an experience is determined by specific mathematical features of that object, in principle allowing a sufficiently mature theory to compute how good or bad a state feels, “all things considered”. Read associated the blog post: https://www.scifuture.org/valence-realism-consciousness-and-ai-a-conversation-with-andres-gomez-emilsson/ Many thanks for tuning in! Please support SciFuture by subscribing and sharing! Buy me a coffee? https://buymeacoffee.com/tech101z Have any ideas about people to interview? Want to be notified about future events? Any comments about the STF series? Please fill out this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mr9PIfq2ZYlQsXRIn5BcLH2onbiSI7g79mOH_AFCdIk/ Kind regards, Adam Ford - Science, Technology & the Future - #SciFuture - http://scifuture.org