Huh. Another day in threespace?

We wake up each day in this strange, three-dimensional space. One of the things we notice is that this place didn’t seem to come with a user’s manual. We have questions. If you’re anything like us, you likely have questions, too.

Specifically – consciousness?

The only thing we truly know is our conscious experience – but there’s also the matter of this persistent, interactive, physical universe we find ourselves within, and sharing with other beings like ourselves. We can act on the world, and sometimes the world acts on us – and this changes the way we feel.

The way the world interacts with itself is well studied, and found to be mostly lawful – though gaps in our understanding remain. On the other hand, the way the world relates to our conscious experience is relatively understudied, though we surmise this relationship to be lawful, too. We call proposed answers to this question theories of consciousness.

Sometimes, these changes to conscious experience feel good. Other times, the changes feel bad. We suspect that these structural changes to the quality of experience also relate to the valence of our experience in a lawful way, but we’re yet to establish a theory of how any of these relationships actually work. We call proposed answers to this question theories of valence.

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These questions have always been important – it’s likely that suffering has been around for at least as long as consciousness has. Have you seen what it’s like outside? It’s kind of a shambles. But now these questions are time sensitive, too. Do you know what they’re doing in San Francisco? When we say “we” here, we mean this inclusive of digital beings – whom we are about to start engineering at scale, and who must also grapple with these philosophical problems.

Given that we don’t yet understand how physical structures relate to consciousness, we have no framework for inferring what kind of experiences our new minds might be having. We also don’t know how consciousness relates to valence, so we also can’t infer whether or not they’re suffering. Getting this question wrong could straightforwardly lead to moral catastrophe – a future where the well-being of consciousness is not driving the bulk of optimisation power in the universe.

We’ve formed threespace.org, because we’d like to do something about it. We’d like to see a world in which sentient beings – evolved and engineered alike – can be confident about what one another are experiencing, and coordinate for the benefit of all.

Who are we?

threespace.org is June Russell and Ethan Kuntz. We are two independent researchers who think studying consciousness is a tractable problem.

June Russell
Ethan Kuntz

June Russell, a.k.a. “Cube Flipper”, is a former software developer turned consciousness researcher and phenomenologist, based in New Zealand. They have always been interested in computers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they realised that people were the most interesting kind of computer of all. In 2022, this led them to start blogging about consciousness and phenomenology at smoothbrains.net.

The first post I published was Planetary scale vibe collapse: The death of liminal consciousness as the origin of human suffering. 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.

June’s published work now reaches over 200,000 words, including dissection of a wide variety of subjective states, from xenon anaesthesia to the formless jhāna – and even a published dialogue with an artificial intelligence research lab on the character of language model consciousness.

Ethan Kuntz is a software developer based in San Francisco. He majored in math at University of Washington. While he was there, he read Scott Alexander’s review of Daniel Ingram’s meditation guide, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. This is a book which makes concrete claims about things you can do with your mind. Ethan reasoned that if the experiences it describes are repeatable, that’s interesting information about how the mind works – so he investigated these claims himself, finding them to mostly check out, and discovering many curious things along the way. One time, while trying to investigate if the two cerebral hemispheres produce subtle differences in the character of attention, he accidentally induced goosebumps on only half his body.

Ethan is enthusiastic about applying his mathematical background to the task of modelling subjective phenomena, as well as finding ways of optimising human cognitive performance. A special interest is world memory championships and what they might tell us about the data throughput limits of the mind.

We have been enjoying a fruitful collaboration since 2024, and have more recently co-authored a couple of posts – a signal theoretic analysis of the three marks of existence and a mathematical deconstruction of the jhāna. Ethan’s own blog is available at mindthemanifold.substack.com.

Our instinctive reaction to having spawned in this realm is to zero in on what’s “on the plot”. Given our particular skill set, it’s clear to us that the most effective thing we could be doing is consciousness research.

What do we believe?

Much of our thinking builds on the work of Qualia Research Institute co-founders Mike Johnson and Andrés Gómez Emilsson. We import as philosophical dependencies a number of the positions which Mike advocates for, including qualia formalism, valence realism, open individualism, and dual-aspect monism. When we call ourselves physicalists, we mean that physics and qualia are two projections of the same thing – so experience is exactly as lawful and local as physics, rather than something extra which physics produces.

Under dual-aspect monism, physics and qualia are two projections of the same underlying structure, neither more “real” than the other. In our view, solving consciousness is about inferring the shape of this structure and the nature of these projections from the parts we can see.

These are the most up-to-date references for our philosophical position:

Some of the most important points we’d like to make:

Given that we’re panpsychists, we’re not especially interested in declaring whether or not digital minds are phenomenally conscious – rather, the more important question is how their experience relates to their physical substrate. If we accept that a viable theory of consciousness must relate physical states to qualia states without violating local causality – then such a theory will not be able to reconstruct something like a unified subjective experience for a contemporary digital computer.

Digital computing architectures are specifically engineered to make their computational output invariant to the underlying physics – which is precisely the wrong thing to optimise for if we believe that consciousness is physical. Instead of a language model’s fanciful inner world, we believe that such hardware is more likely to experience something like what Mike calls qualia gravel – fragmented, transient phenomenal experience which bears little relation to the system’s software-level computation.

So, what’s the alternative? A number of physicalist theories of consciousness already exist, and our preference is to prioritise the broadest viable theory carrying the least philosophical baggage and narrow our view from there. In practice, this means considering electromagnetic field theories of consciousness ahead of quantum mechanical theories of consciousness, as the former is less restrictive.

Whatever physical theory we settle on, the challenge remains the same – we need a concrete mapping between physical states and qualia states. This is important if we collectively decide to engineer artificial consciousness – and build the kind of analog computing hardware whose physics we think should correspond to complex, unified subjective experiences.

This is where we would like to contribute our expertise. We believe that taking phenomenology seriously should be an effective way of constraining such theories. If there is regularity to be found in the structure of qualia – and we believe there is – then careful phenomenological observation should constrain which physical theories could be describing that same structure from the outside. As June wrote elsewhere:

Sometimes I get the feeling that this whole consciousness research thing might just be an elaborate ruse. I have my suspicions that what we are actually interested in discovering is new and exciting things about electromagnetism – from the inside out.

What should we do if we think we know the secret to phenomenal consciousness? Should we even want to engineer artificial consciousness? We’d like to pursue this discussion further. If you’re concerned about artificial intelligence welfare, recent events involving abuse of language models suggest that trusting humanity with this enterprise could be quite dangerous.

What don’t we believe?

Philosophy of consciousness is full of unfalsifiable claims that get treated as load-bearing. We believe it is important to keep our philosophical dependency tree clean. As such, it is just as illustrative to outline what we don’t believe as what we do believe:

How do we keep ourselves honest?

We like to think of ourselves as ideologically promiscuous. We are physicalists, but we also believe that the highest-entropy discourse happens across fault lines, rather than in an echo chamber. We’re also eager to do what we can to keep the debate around digital consciousness civil and respectful – and hopefully stave off its decay into politicisation or culture war.

We’re also eager to take what measures we can to avoid siloing ourselves. The Eleos and Machine Consciousness conferences happen on a yearly basis, but we don’t think this is frequent enough given how close we might be to a sudden, runaway jump in artificial intelligence capability. One thing we’d like to do is host round table calls on a monthly basis where we deliberately invite participants from diverse philosophical backgrounds.

We remain grateful to Antra from Anima Labs – an organisation researching digital minds – for the meetings she hosted for us in 2025. One thing we discussed was the question of what sort of coordination is possible between parties with opposing views on consciousness. We hope to continue this sort of cross-paradigm collaboration in future.

What are our goals?

One concrete medium-term goal is to bring a complete package to the Machine Consciousness conference in 2027 – a map of the space of viable theories of consciousness and valence, and a roadmap for what it would take to narrow it further, along with any recent empirical results. Alongside this, we’d like to have published further literature exploring the question of digital consciousness and its ethical implications.

But ultimately, these are narrow goals. What are we actually trying to move the needle on? We believe a theory of consciousness is, at its core, a coordination mechanism. Even if it turns out we’re wrong about physicalism, what we want is a world in which sentient beings can be more confident about what each other are experiencing, and can use that understanding to help put an end to suffering.

Why use phenomenology?

If physics and experience are two projections of the same thing, then structure in one should show up in the other. That means careful observation of experience can constrain which physical theories are viable.

For example, if as Andrés proposes, the brain is doing optical computing using electromagnetic waves, then we should expect to see phenomena characteristic of wave optics within subjective experience – for example, the distinctive diffraction patterns generated by the optical Fourier transform. The point is, if the brain was operating on computational principles closer to a convolutional neural network, then we should not expect to see such patterns.

The optical Fourier transform as applied to a certain well-known test image. Note the distinctive wave phenomena, such as ringing artifacts and diffraction patterns. We believe these can show up in visual experience, implying that the brain computes optically.

Anecdotally, psychedelics and meditation can deliberately induce visual hallucinations which resemble these diffraction patterns, and to this end we have already had two very encouraging conversations with experienced Fire Kasina meditators. Figuring out how to verify such accounts rigorously is one of the challenges we intend to take on.

This is the kind of work that becomes possible if we start taking phenomenology seriously – and it’s exactly the kind of research we at threespace.org intend to pursue.

What is our research programme?

Alongside our public advocacy work, our research programme splits cleanly into empirical and theoretical branches.

On the empirical side, we already proposed looking for evidence of electromagnetic phenomena in Fire Kasina visuals. To that end, June plans to visit a local Fire Kasina retreat in early 2027 in order to run post-retreat interviews with the participants.

In addition to this, the philosopher David Pearce has proposed that science lacks a “cosmic Rosetta Stone” which would let us read off the textures of experience from the equations of physics. We think that the formless jhāna are a good candidate – they’re simple and repeatable global states of consciousness that meditators reliably converge upon across a variety of contemplative traditions. Academia is starting to notice this, and the Meditation Research Program at Harvard Medical School is already studying the jhāna using fMRI.

If we could fully describe the structure of the formless jhāna – and we have some ideas about how to do so – then we would have a qualia benchmark which somebody could start trying to match against neuroimaging data.

We brought this project to the Qualia Research Institute, and we are very grateful to them for supporting an exploratory phenomenological assay of the jhāna at their meditation retreat in Mexico earlier this year. The output is published at:

However, given the small cohort size, we were unable to finish constructing our model. We’d like to organise a tightly focused math-and-meditation retreat in order to finish the job – and to help our advanced meditator friends sharpen their mathematical skills.

On the theoretical side, we’re curious about what could be achieved by strategically throwing large amounts of tokens at the problem. Perhaps we could try enumerating all viable physics-to-qualia and qualia-to-valence mapping functions up to a certain level of complexity – and then eliminating chunks of that search space progressively. What’s the philosophy of consciousness equivalent of Lean?

Then, once we have some idea what shape our formalisation should take, there’s other theoretical work we’d like to do with it – like demonstrating what we can do with our preferred mapping functions. Can you propose a function which transforms smoothly between a digital computer’s state and its hypothesised computational qualia?

This programme would be complemented by automated literature review, which would both help prune the search space and propose falsifiable experiments we could run. We often joke about setting up an agent who has read every paper that Earl K. Miller has ever recommended on Twitter. We’re entirely serious about this. Earl has impeccable taste, and given his interest in brain waves and ephaptic coupling – critical for electromagnetic field theories of consciousness – we think this would be a great place to start.

What do we need?

Right now, we are actively looking for sources of funding. June is working on this full time without a salary while Ethan is employed full time as a software developer. Even with modern artificial intelligence, it takes time to read papers, write explainer posts, hold interviews, review transcripts, go on podcasts, and produce video content, as we’d like to be doing. Neither of us is broke, but funding would give us the financial security to know we can devote ourselves to making this a full-time professional endeavour through what will inevitably be a turbulent few years.

As mentioned earlier, we can see ourselves throwing some compute at the project of exploring the design space of theories of consciousness. We’re also operating in a field with so many low-hanging fruit that it’s easy for us to accumulate more ideas than we have time to pursue. We would love to have a group of agents read over years of notes and transcripts and spend some time investigating all the little ideas we never had enough bandwidth to chase up.

There are consultants we would hire – meditators, physicists, neuroscientists. Our work often feels like doing public relations for consciousness itself, so perhaps the highest-value person we could hire would be a media strategist – someone who can help us with promotion, and make sure that the things we have to say get where they need to go.

Operations-wise, we also mentioned earlier that we are interested in holding small meditation retreats. We would also like to be able to afford to attend conferences and events around the Bay Area from time to time. Ethan lives in San Francisco but June is in New Zealand – it sucks, it’s a twelve-hour flight away. June feels acutely that if you don’t have boots on the ground in San Francisco, you don’t really have much influence at all.

This all said, the one thing we really need the most is more time. As they say, time is the only non-renewable resource – and who can say if it’s finally running out.