Nick

One benefit of vipassana-style defabrication is if you're anxious you can defabricate whatever you're anxious about and often you'll just forget what it was and the anxiety is gone

this probably isn't good in some subtle long term way but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it works well

worried you're not X enough? Forget who you are, then when it comes back online a bit later the new self is statistically unlikely to be worried it's specifically not X enough

arguably a lot of anxiety is a memory disorder where we can't forget who were are as much as we're meant to. In hunter gatherer times we were probably forgetting who we "are" far more than today

neural network interpretability, mechanistic phenomenology, dharma

some of the most meaningful states accessible by humans have no sense of control or free will, no sense of self, far less complexity than normal day to day life, no inner monologue, no thoughts, and no sense of body

the idea that we can verify whether a model "has consciousness" by looking for whether it has a self-focused inner-monologue is ridiculous and foundationally wrong

eg hard jhana 1 is just pleasure vibrations everywhere, no doer, no action space, no sense of time or body, no center of mind or boundary of mind. You can’t leave it bc you have no action space. It just kicks you out at some point. Yet it’s a beautiful and meaningful qualia

If meditation had an easier on-ramp people would talk about little else

Come to think of it, this is probably why meditation has such a tumultuous on-ramp

Open individualism means you’re the simulators too

The concept of individuality doesn’t really make much sense, no sensation owns any other sensation, and I don’t see why it would make start making sense between the simulator and the simulated

Presumably if there are simulators smart enough to render a universe they’ve advanced past the theory of closed individualism and want the best for us, because they have just as much experiential stock in us as they do in themselves

Even gods can’t make closed individualism true

In this sense we’re likely living the best lives anyone knows how to make for us

Equanimity dampens feedback loops, and most of our sensory field arises from feedback loops. Equanimity doesn't just make it easier to weather the storm, it practically removes the storm

I think the inner monologue is basically just feedback loops, with new sentences being a reaction to old ones, which is why it tends to go away when you stop reacting to inner voice

With enough dampening of feedback loops consciousness fades until it cuts out and you skip forward in time like general anesthesia until something kickstarts enough reaction to get the mind going again

Because feedback loops are naturally exponential, hitting cessation doesn’t actually require being that much more equanimity than being anxious. It just requires the exponent to hit a phase shift where it dampens, then stay with it until everything is gone

I don't know what causes so many good thinkers to equate intellectual capacity with magnitude of experience. Some of the best (jhana) and worst experiences (cluster headaches) are extremely simple states

I think there's likely bugs that suffer far more than I do

Maybe it's such a repugnant conclusion, that there are trillions of creatures experiencing incredible horrors but without the intellectual ability to understand what's going on or get themselves out of bad states that it's just easier to pretend only intelligent beings suffer?

I don't think qualia and intelligence are fully orthogonal, because qualia is non-epiphenomenal and is useful in all sorts of things including intelligence. But they're different things, and saying intelligence is required for experience is messed up

> In reality, there is no "I" in an LLM

I have some news for you about humans

https://t.co/uf0v1rLYh9 https://t.co/etxRdyGCfW

> Developers can and should prevent their systems from making one up

Om 🧘‍♂️

Part of why I loved Everything Everywhere All At Once is it’s the only piece of media I’ve seen that sort of got at this https://t.co/6Ndp46G5GZ

https://t.co/LQdPvE5twk https://t.co/6uNXNU7QVF

Trying to understand the causes of my own ignorance

Founder: https://t.co/klVeAJZtvj

RomeoStevens

Like yes the concept of continuous personal identity falls apart if you think about it for even a few minutes, so “you’ll” experience all of it, and all of qualia is far more wild than anything you can imagine. But any realm you’re reborn into you can try and be kind

It also did a great job in the middle at depicting the miserable disorientation of the part where you’ve perceptually internalized that you are in some sense arising and passing away each moment but don’t yet have equanimity with that, so you try and cling and hang on (to what?)

And finally it showed that with enough equanimity any realm is basically okay, it’s just part of what life is, and we’re here for the long ride

Such a beautiful movie, even if all the Buddhistish parts were basically by accident. I don’t think the directors meant it

Though, it’s unsurprising the same insights would come about from multiple people, since they’re very general ideas

We’ll just flash in and out until the “end” of “time” and many places we flash into will be weirder than anything we could have expected, and that’s okay. Sensate particles can’t hurt us if we don’t cling to them or push them away

A key step in being able to fabricate any sensory particles you want is realizing that everything you’re aware of is already fabricated, a mind render rather than the way things truly are. There’s nothing in principle stopping you from controlling the whole field of awareness

Luckily you don’t need to control the field. The badness in life comes from fighting the field, from resisting it, clinging to it, pushing away from it, etc. Warping the field hurts. If you have equanimity with all flavors of sensory particles  there’s no need to control it

Purposefully fabricating high strength versions of the flavors you don’t like (eg sadness, anxiety, nausea) can be useful for building equanimity via exposure therapy. It will suck a few hundred times but then the nervous system stops fighting and the flavor no longer hurts

Equanimity seems to build non-linearly with flavor strength. Super intense purposefully cultivated fear handled with equanimity does more to build equanimity to it than years of experiencing it non-purposefully. Like a controlled burn vs a wildfire

The flavors we consider bad are only thought to be that way because they’re the ones our nervous system come pre-installed to fight with, to resist, to warp the manifold of awareness when it shows up, but the flavor isn’t bad if you learn to just let it arise and pass

If you let sensations shine freely things are okay no matter what they are https://t.co/XL06xVeB84

(Of course, with equanimity to all flavors the goal isn’t to hurt yourself, but to be freed up to help others, which is what the monk in the above photo was aiming to do via protest)

Another analogy is an immune system where we start out with lots of allergies. We can overcome these allergies via careful exposure (similar to allergy shots) until we simply aren’t allergic to things anymore

There’s still fear, sadness, etc but we’re not inflamed by them

And if they’re ever too strong for your current level of allergicness and it’s too uncomfortable you can often choose to fabricate other particles in their place (joy, etc) that you’re less allergic to

If you’re allergic to peanuts (fear, jealousy, etc) being able to transform peanuts into fruit (joy, love, etc) is great. But there’s also something nice and beautiful about peanuts, and it’s better to simply not be allergic to them than only being able to tolerate fruit

I’m grateful that some guy asked what is the cause of all suffering, rather than just worrying about the details of each particular particle of suffering

I’d definitely go through all of life worrying about mitigating one suffering at a time. I think it’s non-obvious to look for a root cause, and even more non-obvious that there would be a clear one

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