Nick

if things have ever felt more or less real did it feel better or worse than normal

neural network interpretability, mechanistic phenomenology, dharma

jhana sometimes feels a little like but with pleasure https://t.co/rnO72Cj0g6

Camera sent down a hole in East Antarctica uncovers Earth's oldest ice (≈2 million yrs old) https://t.co/PGWSeyeMwJ

Daily history lessons. Education through memes!

Historic Vids

though after a few hundred times most people report it becomes far less dramatic, and this is my experience too. Less rollercoaster and more like turning on a heater in a room and feeling it heat up, but with joy instead of heat. More cozy

do you feel like more of a noun or a verb. Do you have a regular meditation practice?

do you feel more like a noun or verb? / are you quite scared of death or not much?

(not the painful process of dying, but the prospect of non-existence)

“okay so there’s stuff and when it’s put together so it looks kind of like a loopy self referencing algorithm or something then it becomes conscious with a little temporally persistent guy floating in a skull with free will who does what it wants separate of the laws of physics” https://t.co/4NaOJaJ9s2

composer-monk ordained by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh | human wearing robes | questions over answers | tea usually helps

Brother Spirit (Phap Linh)

“then one day the little skull man dies and then he kind of experiences a dark void forever isn’t that scary!”

.vs @algekalipso’ian qualia is field-like and causally interacts with stuff, evolved topological pockets are why we feel separate but it’s not “real” just one being. No vague computational epiphenomenal algos with no evo explanation, no individuals, no free will, just physics https://t.co/GZ2TokIzSL

It’s usually healthiest to cultivate persistent self-love before trying to persistently dissolve the ego https://t.co/vbZd2ISUdE

a healthy ego is generally far easier to transcend than an unhealthy one

What a strange time it is to be a dead star reanimated by chance and patience

Hormeze ❤️‍🔥🥲

Though temporarily dissolving the ego can be helpful in building self-love. Usually this happens via MDMA, but it doesn’t need to. By stepping outside yourself you can see more clearly, then fall in love, and when the ego reforms it’ll hopefully have love welded into it

One reason why self love is a good initial goal is because the only good way to persistently dissolve the ego is by letting go of it. You can’t sit eyes closed and try to destroy it, you cultivate equanimity and release your grip. This is easier when the baseline is one of love

I think persistent egoless state has a lot of benefits, but it’s also a pretty major phenomenological surgery. Whereas self-love is basically just good, few tradeoffs. Better to initially aim for things with few tradeoffs when you can

Meditation over the long term tends to flatten the difference between “good” feelings and “bad” feelings, but not in a dead or numb way

You’re curious which sensations will spark into being next, but you don’t care as much what flavor of sensations they are

One marker of if the flattening is wholesome or not is sensory clarity (bc wholesomeness requires less competing attentional processing). When sensations shine into existence they should be high resolution and beautiful

If it’s numb & low sensory clarity something isn’t right

really what’s happening is that a subtle ~0.1s operation called tanha was causing the thing you didn’t like, dukkha, and once you learn to stop doing that all flavors of sensation become delicious

but it takes a long time to learn not to do tanha, so it happens gradually

It’s counterintuitive that there’s only one thing we don’t like (dukkha) that we can just take out, but it does seem to be how things work

it’s like an allergen. Like learning that you’re not allergic to cakes, cappuccinos, etc just lactose, and you can learn to take it out

Dukkha is hard to talk about because most people haven’t felt it as a thing by itself, but it’s closely related to viscosity in sensory experience, and (temporal) asymmetry, it’s full and heavy and it feels bad

the meditative path is about wholesome construction and wholesome destruction

The eight jhanas are useful because the first four teach wholesome construction, roughly of the brahmaviharas, and the latter four teach how to deconstruct until all is gone and you blink out

too much construction gives you what most people do all their lives: try and fight with the world and make it better for them, so they don’t feel uncomfortable. This tends to leave out the core fruit of the path: that well-being doesn’t require any particular emotion or state

too much deconstruction leads to vipassana zombies who habitually deconstruct. They feel good and rarely suffer, but it’s hard for them to be of the world, to help make this place better, and they’re missing the artistic exploration of qualia, not everything is about hedonic tone

I don’t play piano but from what I’ve read practicing the scales is a critical part of the learning path. Jhanas are like scales for meditation, they teach most of the basics skills you’ll need to go all the way without losing balance. They’re good and wholesome defaults

When you can do the jhanas well, usually after years of practice, you can ask your nervous system to go through them and it will know what to do. It’ll enter bliss, then joy, comfort, equanimity, then deconstruct self and space, then perception itself until cessation

Project idea: download all the Rob Burbea talks from Dharmaseed, run them through Whisper (voice -> text), do a bit of curation and organization to create a nice explorable website of the talks. So much good stuff in there that's hard to explore today

https://t.co/AuyG4WEqls https://t.co/ayV0l1Oirg

Optimistically might be able to throw the whole site in a language model in a year or two and allow it to summarize the 450 talks into a new book, with each section of the book linking to the source material (both text and video). This is helping setup the foundation for that

Every meditation teacher talks about the present moment as a special important thing but rightfully people often don’t get why it matters. Or what it means. Even my depressive thoughts about the past or anxious ruminations of the future are in the present moment

One important insight related to the present moment is just to realize that same sentence experientially. Your fantasies aren’t in another place, they’re just spatially located in your head and tend to trap your attention such that you forget you’re in the world

(oh lol some people thought I was going to rant about sbf, not the abstract idea of the present moment)

The middle of your head forms a kind of attentional wormhole that’s weird if you look at it clearly. It actually spatially twists in a weird way to give the false impression than more space than the actual width of your head. That’s why mind’s eye fantasies can seem so large

You can only notice this if you can expand your awareness first. Try listen for an actual plane flying 5000ft above you, don’t imagine it just listen for it, check if there’s a plane, now while your awareness is expanded try imagining a cute dog, but without collapsing attention

If you do it without collapsing awareness you’ll feel the mental image of a dog arise in your head region within a bigger space that includes the world around you. It’s all one place, one rendered world-model, one 3d spatial set of sensate particles, the present moment

But why does this matter? It doesn’t directly. Who cares that you can do a neat party trick of attention to inside and outside at the same time

It matters because the real devil is a subtle mental mechanic called tanha that causes approximately all the problems

Tanha is a grabby sensation so fast that you don’t notice it without lots of practice. Among many other things it turns sensate particles into something that feel like “your problem”, I think (conjecture, could be wrong) “being triggered” is when you have a large amount of tanha

When things feel more like you, or more permanent, or like they’re the one perfect thing that will finally give you infinite happiness (eg crushes) they get more tanha. When you have big awareness and you watch something arise and pass into it mindfully, less tanha, less grab

Putting these together, there’s nothing wrong about thinking about the future or the past, as long as you experientially recognize you’re not *actually* in the future or the past, you’re sitting at a cafe or whatever. This matters bc you realize it’s a fabrication, a thought

When you realize it’s just an idea you can handle it more playfully. You don’t get “lost” in thoughts and you aren’t grabbing it with your attention instinctively and frenetically. You’re just a spacious presence around the thoughts playing with the future

A lot of beginning meditators think meditation is about having no thoughts or no inner monologue or ever imagining the future or past. It’s not! Meditation does tend to reduce those things, your mind just gets more interested in what is here now, but it’s bad to push them away

The whole of the meditative path is about letting go, which leads to peace and flow through the attenuation of tanha. In some specific practices you might want to attend to the body more than say inner monologue. But in the general case let things arise and pass, let them go

tldr qualia is a non-linear vector space of sensate particles, it’s non-linear (warped) partially to trick you into believing the inside of your head is a special place outside the present moment. Avoid trap by noticing it, which increases flow and valence and life goodness

also self/ego is just an idea and ball of tension arising in this warped space, like any idea it’s just another sensate particle with no special ontological status. The reason it feels so important is partially bc the warped space makes it feel bigger than it is (~an inch)

Scott wrote another post summarizing the comments 

A couple dozen jhana practitioners fight a half dozen skeptics, the jhana-ers agree it’s awesome and helpful but they don’t choose to do it that often, which breaks everyone’s model of how humans work

https://t.co/CCeZBEyMMU https://t.co/nONQGHiOJD

Scott wrote about me and jhanas

https://t.co/a16MN90vqv

Though it’s only surprising if you treat humans as pleasure maximizers, which in my opinion is wrong

Pleasure craving is like water and thirst. The problem is people have a pleasure scarcity. When people have enough water they don’t seek it endlessly, same with pleasure https://t.co/bFM7K4rMZU

Importantly, the pleasure must be wholesome and reliable, so you can feel safe knowing it won’t go away, letting you relax into it. This pleasure nourishes and heals you. The “wireheading” narrative doesn’t match how humans actually work

vs unwholesome pleasure is like saltwater https://t.co/YDFztZy1fl

Wholesome meaning it has relatively more buy-in from all parts of you. Versus say in most cases drinking alcohol some part of you knows it’s not good, even if some parts of it are good. Things can be more or less wholesome, contributing to the whole of you rather than just parts

I want to be clear that I don’t think jhana is the only wholesome pleasure, and I don’t think most people should do the jhanas! They’re just one tool. I basically think all the standard recs are wholesome — exercise, socializing, journaling etc. No single answer for everyone

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