ConSciEnt is my R&D effort to understand consciousness and apply that understanding to build world-changing technology.

My current active project is Vultolysis, where I'm studying the nature of free will and how it works. For more detail, check out the project page.

Approach

I am currently generally focused on extensive observation, phenomenological description and cataloguing; I believe we need our Rudolphine Tables before we attempt our Principia.

I am always seeking opportunities to take a meaningful question or insight and turn it into a useful marketable product idea. While the primary goal is to learn more about the world, I believe that the requirements of building a tangible product can add an additional guide to objectivity in my research findings and will encourage timely focused work toward meaningful goals. If successful, this will also establish a virtuous circle of each discovery providing the resources to make the next.

I expect this approach may change at any moment. I am especially interested in promising candidates for causally relating aspects of experience to neurobiology.

Following and participating

If you're interested in following along with my progress, please subscribe below to my free¹ newsletter where I send out occasional updates on the research and invite participation. You can also subscribe to everything relating to ConSciEnt (RSS) to get a more up-to-the-minute but perhaps less helpfully structured view. If you want to join in the work in any capacity or provide feedback, please reach out!

Philosophy

Consciousness consists of natural biological phenomena that are in principle knowable and exploitable by man. It is an evolved biological capability, and any explanations of its nature must ultimately be compatible with evolutionary processes. In particular, any hypotheses suggesting it plays no causal role or some aspect is fundamentally illusory have an extremely high bar to clear to be considered plausible.

I have direct access to an overwhelming abundance of information about my own experiences, and have ways of intentionally manipulating them. That is enough to incrementally learn about their nature, their causal interrelations, and how they relate to already well-understood natural phenomena. Given the centrality of experience to human flourishing, as my understanding grows there will be opportunities to apply it to practical use, providing both further tools for observation and experimentation and the ultimate proving ground of the correctness of my findings, not to mention financial and other resources to expand the work.

The name ConSciEnt (pronounced like the English word "conscient") comes from Consciousness Science Enterprises, aspirationally reflecting both the discovery and application oriented aspects of the approach.

Unfortunately, the current mainstream scientific paradigm of mechanistic reduction, by forcing everything to ultimately be described in terms of concepts like position, time, mass, etc, gets in the way. Without some new addition or modification, this set of concepts is incapable of even describing conscious experience, let alone including it as a causally relevant phenomenon. With a few important exceptions, all approaches I know of that break out of that mold attempt to dissolve the problem by defining it away or treating it as outside of the realm of scientific inquiry altogether, jumping instead to ungrounded abstract theorizing or outright mysticism. A properly integrated understanding will require a conceptual revolution, but that has happened before within the sciences without abandoning the empirical inductive approach and it can happen again.