I’m Jhonatan Serna — researcher, consultant, and founder.
I lead the Center for Sentience, where we mathematically model and build multi-scale structural biomarkers of valence and awareness in digital and biological minds. Prior to this, I worked as an IT management consultant, product owner, and business analyst in financial services, and I founded and administered technology enterprises in Sweden and Estonia. I have a background in computational physics.
Much of my work is about trying to help us orient wisely towards the nature of sentience and positive valence. This work spans several domains, starting with the foundation of computational physics, feeding into neural network simulations and Global Workspace Theory (GWT), and leading to the formalization of positive valence engineering (such as our "Digital EEG for AI Sentience" framework) to prevent suffering and map pathways of well-being. I also write independently about personal growth, contemplation, and the phenomenology of existence (grief, equanimity, and being present).
You can learn more about me here.
My twitter is @strugen.
My email is strugen@proton.me.
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The fragility of reacting to life's favorable inputs.
An inquiry into why maintaining happiness under perfect external conditions is easy, and why the real challenge lies in building a non-reactive cognitive architecture.
The cost of genuine curiosity.
When the problem is not motivation but too many things that genuinely deserve attention — an honest reckoning with what curiosity costs and what to do about it.
Not a framework. Just what I actually think.
What a good life looks like from where I stand — shaped by Colombia, Scandinavia, and Zurich, and still not fully resolved.
A note on why I write.
I have less than 100 years on this planet. Writing is how I make sense of what I see, think, and feel.
An insight from sorrow.
Pain is one of the most reliable drivers of awareness we have. A look at the patterns of identity formed in Colombia and tested in Europe.
An insight from sorrow.
Not a framework. Just what I actually think.
Spatially-constrained neural GWT & IIT architectures.
Our flagship Center for Sentience working paper (CSR-WP-05) exploring global broadcasting and local attractor dynamics to model pleasure and pain.
From Kidney Stones to Qualia.
Using a severe renal colic episode to explain the non-linear, exponential progression of physical pain, connecting it to the Qualia Research Institute's (QRI) valence theories.
Dreams as regularization in biological and artificial networks.
Bridges our training pipelines with Erik Hoel's theory that dreams are a mathematical necessity (dropout/noise injection) to keep plastic minds from overfitting.
The fragility of reacting to life's favorable inputs.
A note on why I write.
An insight from sorrow.