The main theme of YHouse research is the study of the origins and nature of awareness. Awareness is an umbrella term that includes consciousness, cognition, intelligence, and similar terms that have more specific meaning in particular academic fields, and sometimes rather different meanings in different fields.
Consciousness is clearly correlated with brain states, but is it produced by brains? If so, it's very different from the way an organ like the liver produces a compound like bile. What does it actually mean to use the word production to talk about consciousness? It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking about consciousness as a kind of subtle substance.
Cognition is a term that covers more than consciousness, applying to unconscious processes that lead to knowledge. But it is also less complete in other ways; typically studying consciousness from the outside, from a third-person view, leaving out the perspective of first-person direct experience.
Intelligence is often seen as highly successful logical inference, as in the term artificial intelligence, thereby excluding notions such as emotional intelligence, or street smarts – behaviors that can be associated with intelligence, but in a way that cannot be easily quantified or formalized.
Five Modules
What should a university look like in the 21st Century? Part of the YHouse mission is to explore that question, to find a better way to do research, and to help grow a brand new generation of thinkers. At YHouse, modules are not traditional departments, they are low-walled zones of focus, specifically designed to foster abundant interdisciplinary collaboration, coexisting beneath one physical roof.
Individual modules have a strong disciplinary core of three senior researchers carrying out top-level disciplinary work together but also pioneering explorations in novel interdisciplinary directions across modules. A larger number of early-career researchers and postdocs divide their efforts according to their interests at any given time, either focused within specific modules or linking across few or even many.
In their investigation of awareness, Modules 1, 2, and 3 represent the three main stages of biosphere evolution: from the origins and major transitions of life, to culture, and to technology. These stages date back, roughly speaking, to four billion, forty thousand, and forty years ago, spanning the first living cell, the first cave paintings, and the first practical applications of artificial intelligence.
Modules 4 and 5 reflect on the similarities and differences between the structures studied in the first three modules, in pursuit of the origins and nature of awareness, as well as the nature of the transitions between those modules. Module 4 focuses on philosophy, in the widest sense of the word, while module 5 has more directly practical aims; bringing science, philosophy, and wisdom to bear on the major problems currently facing the world.