smoothbrains.net: A three-year retrospective

Posted on 18 October 2025 by Cube Flipper

I began writing this blog in the middle of 2022. The first post I published was Planetary scale vibe collapse: The death of liminal consciousness as the origin of human suffering, which I wrote because I wanted to help a friend of mine to understand the concept of liminality. I also figured that starting a blog would be a decent way to make friends on the internet. This said, I really only expected that six or seven of my close friends would read it – but Scott Alexander included it in his Links For December 2022 mailer, describing it as maybe the weirdest post I’ve read this year. I found this immensely encouraging and resolved to keep writing.

This project quickly evolved into an effort to apply a phenomenology-first approach to consciousness research, joining the Qualia Research Institute’s project in treating the notion of qualia as the subject of something like a pre-paradigmatic field theory. Oftentimes, this has felt a little like living in a Greg Egan story. This quest to understand the relationship between subjective experience and objective reality has led me to meet some very interesting people around the world – and on occasion to consume unusual substances in exotic locations.

Watching Stuart Hameroff present at the Science of Consciousness Conference in Barcelona earlier this year, a conference which – let’s be honest – can feel about as bizarre as the Einstein Centenary Conference in Greg Egan’s science fiction novel Distress. In this slide, Stuart is demonstrating transcranial focused ultrasound – a form of noninvasive brain stimulation, which I was lucky enough to experience myself last year.

Now, if I run wc posts/* on this directory, it tells me that I’ve published 132,568 words over the course of three years. I’m now planning to take a break from writing – at least until next year sometime – so this feels like a natural place to pause and take stock. This project has been a self-funded labour of love so far, but I would also like to step back for a little while in order to decide how this fits into my life – and which projects I will continue to focus my efforts on.

Sequences

On this website’s homepage, the posts I’ve written so far are presented in chronological order – but many of these posts develop common themes and build on arguments made and models proposed in previous posts. In order to make this easier to navigate, I’ve arranged the writing so far into a set of short “sequences”:

Phenomenology 1.1: Lehar’s frameworks

Reviewing the phenomenological frameworks proposed by the vision researcher Steven Lehar, which are used as a foundation for other discussion of phenomenology. Animations contributed by Scry Visuals.

Phenomenology 1.2: Psychoactive drugs

Detailed reviews of the subjective effects of different drugs, generally discussing their pharmacology and phenomenology before attempting to propose something about how they work.

Phenomenology 2.1: The spatial domain

Discussions of different models of low-level subjective phenomena. References the work of Mike Johnson, Andrés Gómez Emilsson, Mark Lippmann, Brad Caldwell, and Roger Thisdell.

Phenomenology 2.2: The frequency domain

Discussions of somewhat more advanced models of phenomenology with a focus on signal theory and the frequency domain. These posts reference the work of Romeo Stevens and Matthew Leo, and were written with contributions from Wystan Bryant-Scott, Ethan Kuntz, and Andrés Gómez Emilsson.

The QRI psychophysics retreats

In 2023, I participated in the Qualia Research Institute’s two psychophysics retreats, held in Brazil and Canada. The full contributions from all participants are available on heart.qri.org, but I also host copies of my own writeups here:

Standalone posts

Posts which don’t really fit into any sequence but which I’d still like to showcase:

What’s next?

Phenomenology and consciousness research are two fields with too many low-hanging fruit. It seems like every time I begin investigating something, I wind up with three or four additional projects I’d like to spin up – and there’s never enough time to try them all. I’d like to share my current project list:

I’m not really sure what I want to prioritise next or what support I might need in order to do it. I would also like to find a way to base myself in the United States, if possible. Some friends have suggested that I should try to get accepted into a PhD program somewhere – but this seems expensive, and I’m not sure whether it would be an appropriate venue for the research I think is important. Perhaps what makes the most sense is for me to finally take the time to develop a meditation practice – and perhaps I’ll also find the time to write some science fiction stories at last.

Prior to developing an interest in consciousness research, my main interest was in alternative programming paradigms, as I believe that the current state of software development is severely limiting the expression of human volition. I have written about this here and here. A friend of mine is working on such an effort to reinvent computing which I believe shows a lot of promise, so it’s possible that I wind up contributing to her project at some point.

Whether or not I do continue with this kind of consciousness research – there are not enough people working in this space, and we are always looking for additional collaborators. If you do believe you have some fresh insight to contribute – I think the best way to get involved is by starting a blog.

Ciao for now~

Papers

There is a well-known anecdote from the computer programmer John Carmack about what he did when he wanted to understand what was the state of the art in machine learning and artificial intelligence research:

So I asked Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, for a reading list. This is my path, my way of doing things: give me a stack of all the stuff I need to know to actually be relevant in this space. And he gave me a list of like forty research papers and said, “If you really learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters today”. And I did. I plowed through all those things and it all started sorting out in my head.

Apparently the original list was lost, although speculative reconstrutions exist. I’m a software developer by trade, so my understanding of science is entirely self-taught – mostly by just sitting down and grinding through long lists of papers, so I relate to Carmack’s approach to self-education.

People occasionally ask me if I have a list of key papers which I recommend reading – so I took the time to scroll through my Zotero database and compiled a list of fifty papers here. I won’t claim that this list constitutes 90% of what matters – but the following papers were all formative to my thinking, or at least quirky or interesting:

Books

I also recommend the following textbooks, most of which I have read at least part of during the past three years:

I must also recommend phaseborn’s novel Upon the Mirror Sea, which is some of the best cyberpunk I have encountered in years. When I first ran across it, this felt as if the universe had served up a piece of science fiction perfectly tailored to my own personal tastes. My review is here.