Hey Jessica, I really appreciate the thoughtful review. I agree with parts and disagree with parts:
One core objection, which I completely understand, is that “Johnson is primarily concerned with identifying conscious agents experiencing pleasure and pain, for the purpose of optimizing the universe for more pleasure.” PQ does not make this claim, although I understand it could be read as such. Since writing PQ I’ve more explicitly stepped away from hedonic utilitarianism as a practical ethics and consider myself a solid believer in virtue ethics. My North Star in this research is knowledge.
Another objection which I think is useful to discuss is the following:
If our high-level phenomenology has no “crisp, intuitive correspondence with the underlying physics and organizational principles which give rise to it”, it’s unclear why a bottom-up theory would succeed either for the purpose of predicting our high-level phenomenology, which is a core objective in my approach. It would seem that we need to move through many layers of abstraction in the stack, from psychology to neuroscience to chemistry to physics.
This is actually something I see as promising for the Symmetry Theory of Valence: that it may offer a bottom-up frame that can reach up to high-level phenomenology, due to symmetry often being expressed at multiple scales.
I think the new paper is much more clear about the motivations around borrowing the symmetry aesthetic from physics, and also proposes better empirical tests, though it has narrower ambitions.
would love to get @Michael Edward Johnson’s responses here
He responded on Substack: