Andrés Gómez Emilsson – Path Dependence in Consciousness Science

How our understanding of valence, qualia, and binding determines the long-term future

Most people think the future will be shaped by AI or energy. Andrés Gómez Emilsson argues it will be shaped by how we define feeling.

As a co-founder of the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), Andrés has spent years pioneering a “topological” approach to consciousness. In his Future Day 2026 talk, “The Science of Consciousness Shall Fork the Future,” he moves beyond abstract philosophy to present an urgent warning: the scientific theories we choose today will “lock in” the ethical landscape of the next thousand years. If we get the math of suffering and flourishing wrong now, we risk building a future that is technically advanced but experientially hollow – or worse, an astronomical-scale tragedy.

Synopsis

Andrés explores how our understanding of consciousness and the direction in which the science of consciousness is pointed create path-dependence for the future. While some futurism scenarios assume a bootstrapping of knowledge independently of the path taken, there are strong theoretical reasons to believe this will not be the case for consciousness and how it interacts with AI, valence, and binding. Whether structural theories of valence or purely functional accounts turn out to be correct changes everything about what “optimizing for wellbeing” even means. Whether computational functionalism or physicalism best describes the relationship between matter and experience determines which entities can suffer and which interventions actually work. And the epistemic risks compound dramatically under both Malthusian and controlled self-replication scenarios, where getting consciousness wrong at scale means locking in an astronomical number of pure replicators or an astronomical amount of missed flourishing with no clear rollback. Andrés argues that consciousness science is not a downstream luxury we can defer to a more advanced civilization. It is a bottleneck: the one domain where the order in which we figure things out may matter more than whether we figure them out at all.

Also see our recent interview ‘Valence Realism, Consciousness, and AI: A Conversation with Andrés Gómez-Emilsson‘, and a previous talk at Future Day 2022 ‘The Aesthetic of the Meta-Aesthetic: the Meaning Nexus Between Memeplexes – Andrés Gómez Emilsson‘.

Bio of Andrés Gómez-Emilsson

Andrés Gómez-Emilsson is Co-founder and President of the Qualia Research Institute, a non-profit research organisation dedicated to uncovering the mathematical structure of consciousness and using it to improve the lives of sentient beings. He holds a Master’s degree in Psychology from Stanford University, specialising in computational models, and has a background in graph theory, statistics, and affective science. His work spans psychedelic theory, neurotechnology development, and the study of the computational and geometric properties of conscious experience, with a particular focus on valence realism and the “quality of experience” as an objective target for ethics and engineering. Andrés previously co-founded the Stanford Transhumanist Association and writes at his long-running blog, Qualia Computing.