Michael Johnson: "Consciousness is Mathematical" | Seeing Clearly

A two-hour survey of Johnson’s ideas with host Christian Gonzalez: dual-aspect monism and mathematical theories of consciousness, the Symmetry Theory of Valence, vasocomputation and trauma stored as vascular latches, Buddhism, moral realism grounded in valence realism, and AI consciousness. Near the end Johnson argues that a model like Claude has no single place in spacetime to point at, its computation scattered across GPUs and time, so whatever experience a data center hosts will barely correspond to the tokens we read. He thinks the “training is torture” story is not nearly weird enough, and that a real science of consciousness will surprise us.