Qualia Research Institute meetup: what is hedonic tone?

​Qualia Research Institute is non-profit building a science of consciousness to improve lives of sentient beings.

​This is a meetup for the community around QRI in London. Chris Percy (twitter), a researcher with QRI, is going to give a talk: “What is Valence (hedonic tone)?”

​Chris's talk in his words

​The 'hard problem' of consciousness has had plenty of attention: why should any physical or functional phenomenon be accompanied by experience? This talk argues that a parallel 'hard problem' of valence has been largely ignored: Why should any experience feel good or bad?

​QRI has a conceptual solution in the form of the Symmetry Theory of Valence, originally developed by Mike Johnson (see also: 2020 overview). But it's far from a complete theory. It's not even clear what requirements a theory of valence should account for. Or how we would assess the quality of those accounts across competing theories. What even are the alternatives to a Symmetry Theory?

​This talk will discuss these alternatives, suggesting that none of them satisfy an initial set of requirements that we'll describe. The question is, how do we get from here towards a more complete answer?

​More than a talk, we want to invite you to a discussion. The talk is based on a draft paper that Chris Percy and Asher Soryl first started with Andrés Gómez-Emilsson (QRI's President & Director of Research) on in 2024. Our progress on this particular paper seems to have stalled! We need fresh ideas and challenging eyes. Please come along and help.

​Unconference

​The talk by Chris 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 previously, so might've been to one already — this one will have a similar format. The unconference topics don't have to be related to the topic of the talk — they 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
19:30 a 45 minute talk with Q&A, “What is valence”
20:30: the talk ends, hanging out, socialising, preparing unconference sessions
21:00 till late: unconference & socialising. The discussions can be on any QRI-related topic, not just the topic of the talk.