My guess is that meditation trains a lot of different skills, that whatever my brain
does trains an overlapping but slightly different set of skills and at different
proportional effectiveness, and that the end result is me being all over the place
and not really possible to place on the scale.
From my experience, it seems that the core skill related to enlightenment is “second-order recognizing” (with two aspects: speed, and range of phenomena that it has access to), and everything else is downstream from it. Other skills built in meditation seem to be either to be incidental or merely helpful in developing second-order recognizing.
In light of that, I would not be so quick to assume some kind of personal uniqueness in terms of the model I laid out, especially given that that kind of thinking does seem to be a common human bias.
Hmm, some of my many of my psychological problems that’s been ruining my life
for more than a year or so actually sounds a lot like how you describe stage 3…
Than again half f every psychological effect or condition I’ve ever heard of does, so
it’s not very string evidence.
Right, I wouldn’t take psychological problems as evidence for being in stage three, unless there was additional evidence for that. Psychological problems are common enough.
more something like “I know that some kind of events take
place inside my brain (I call all of these “thoughts” and am confused abaut how
people seem to classify some as “imagery” some as “thought” some as “feeling”
etc. Those words are complete synonyms to me.) and some happen outside of my
brain, but other than location they don’t seem any different and I get information
about them through the same channel not sorted into two different piles like most
people do.
If you intuitively and self-evidently see some phenomena as happening outside and some phenomena happening inside, which is what “[...]other than location they don’t seem any different[...]” means to me, that seems precisely to be sorting phenomena into two different piles. As if they come pre-tagged with “location” data.
As a long-time meditator, I don’t recognize phenomena as intuitively or self-evidently “inside” or “outside” or “neither inside nor outside” or “both inside and outside.” That entire classificatory scheme has ceased to exist for me. (In some ways I lack the ability to conceptualize what it would mean, although I remember that it used to mean something to me.) There is no location tag, and there is no empty field where the location tag would be. Of course, my model of the world tells me that some phenomena (sensory experience) represent stuff in the external world (albeit produced produced “inside,” through brain activity), while other phenomena (cognition) merely represent the activity of my brain, but that is just a model, something which can be altered for all sorts of reasons, and not the default way that my experience is parsed.
How would you really know what’s inside your brain and what’s outside your brain, except by applying an explicit detailed model of how the world works? Is that what you’re doing when sorting phenomena? Or are you using some more primitive way to sort (e.g. “sort by location tag”)? Because sorting by the application of a model is not a low-level cognitive process, and has all the implications for what that sorting is like which follow from not being a low-level cognitive process.
Apart from this, I’m not sure why you think thoughts and imagery and feelings are synonymous. If someone asked you how you felt, do you think “visualizing purple monkeys” could be an appropriate response? (Are you a synaesthete?)
I can sort events by where they happen and put aside those who have
the location ‘armoks brain’ but it’s not somehting by brain does all the time if I don’t
tell it to. ”
My guess is that this refers to the explicit sorting by the application of a model; for you, things come tagged by location, and you can choose to use the location tag to sort phenomena, or you can simply not sort.
So, unless I’m wildly misunderstanding you, my guess is that you aren’t partially enlightened. But, who knows. Have you tried the cessation-of-consciousness test I described to Adelene?
When I said I had no self I meant it more literally than you describe the meditation-
attained one. “my mind is comprised of various automatic processes, there is
nothing that ‘subjectively experience’ them, and words like ″me and ‘I’ are just
pragmatically useful labels the usage of which varies with context and which
obviously don’t correspond to anything in the real world. ”.
As far as I can tell, “me” and “I” correspond to things in the world, or at least, there is a way to interpret them so that they do. They may not correspond to anything ontologically unique, but they definitely do describe features of the functioning of a physical system (your brain / body complex in relation to its environment) as precisely as might be expected from natural language terms.
What you’re describing sounds to me like some kind of dissociative state.
(Speaking of which, if
you ever need an expendable human to be tortured for 3^^^3 years or somehting I’ll
volunteer so that an actual person wont have to do it.)
In your opinion, what are you missing that would make you an actual person? The feeling of being an actual person formed of processes that cohere? (regarding my “dissociative state” guess.)
I can assure you (with high probability) that most people you run into would consider you an actual person rather than a sequence of unrelated processes, regardless of whether or not you feel like an actual person. I’m sure (with high probability) that you recognize that all the processes in your experience function together in a precise, finely-tuned way, which is how you’re managing to have this conversation with me, and handle the rest of your life. So what’s missing?
Hmm, updating on this I’d guess I a very wide Range of Phenomena, but maybe normal or possibly even worse worse speed. I’d also guess the incidental skills and effects are probably involved in the stages phenomena.
Also I never said I were alone in this. In fact we already know of two individuals that show these symptoms just in the pool of people who have read this thread.
Right, I wouldn’t take psychological problems as evidence for being in stage three, unless there was additional evidence for that. Psychological problems are common enough.
I have a lot more than normal psychological problems. Also I meant the specifics you described, like feelings of things sucking and blaming it on various things that turn out to have been completely unrelated.
[location stuff]
Gah, no that’s the OPPOSITE of what I meant. I mean location literally, as in x,y,z,t coordinates. And no things dont come PRE sorted, then I would have to sort them.
Location doesn’t sort into two piles, it sorts into an infinite amount of piles arranged in a hierarchy. Examples of location tags would be:
Everything>thisUniverse>earth>home>armoksBrain>visualCortex Everything>thisUniverse>earth>home>armoksStomac
Everything>thisUniverse>earth>home>desktop>harddrive>documentsFolder
Everything>thisUniverse>earth>USA>EliezersBrain>MoRverse>harrysBrain>modelOfQuirelsBrain>modelOfHarrysBrain>modelOfQuirelsBrain>auditoryCrotex
Everything>algebra>sin(x)>thirdInflectionPointToTheLeftFromOrigo
etc.
The concept of applying tags to things that are not part of my model of the world makes no sense. An outside datastream becoming integrated into the model is what “sensory experience” MEANS. Same thing with like half the concepts you are referencing. “know” is defined as a part of the model that is trusted.
I’m not sure what would be an “appropriate” response, visualizing is an action, output not input, and also “how do you feel” tends to be after longer term trends rather than the exact moment, but if I had been doing nothing but that for hours “I feel purple monkeys.” would be a perfectly valid response. It’s weird, but that’s because the actual state it describes is weird.
[“me/I” semantics]
Well as I said they can mean different things depending on context, and some of those correspond to things in the real world, but the most common meaning don’t.
personhood
My working definition is somehting like “an agent that a correct and fully informed implementation of CEV would assign subjective experience and care about for it’s own sake.”.
My working definition is somehting like “an agent that a correct and fully informed implementation of CEV would assign subjective experience and care about for it’s own sake.”.
I strongly suggest that you start tabooing CEV, both in this conversation and in your thoughts. Trying to use a concept that’s as poorly defined as that generally is in such a basic way carries a significant risk of leading to some very, very confused ways of thinking.
That sounds like a good idea, but I have no idea how to actually implement it since it refers to a somehting I know is defined, but can only guess at the definition of.
I expect you can taboo the term in the regular sense even if you can’t taboo it in the rationalist sense. (Yes, this will mean re-doing your definition. I expect that that will be beneficial.)
No; the concept of Friendly AI depends on the concept of CEV, so a proper tabooing (in either sense) of the concept of CEV would affect that, too.
You know how your mind returns an ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ error when asked direct questions about your self, since it doesn’t use that concept? What I’m suggesting is that you remove concepts such that it returns that same error when asked direct questions about CEV, and re-answer DavidM’s question using only the remaining concepts. You can rebuild the CEV concept, if you want, but I suggest you do so in a way that allows you to rationalist-taboo it.
I am unable to remove the Friendly AI concept without destroying the concepts of “good”, “bad”, “value”, “person”, “worthwhile”, “preferable”, “person”, “concious”, “subjective experience”, “humanity”, “reality”, “meaning”, etc. the list just goes on and on and on. They’re all directly or indirectly defined in therms of it. Further, since without those there is no reason for truth to be preferable to falsehood with this removed any model of my mind won’t try to optimize for it and just turns to gibberish.
Ouch. Okay, the above advice is probably too late to be useful at all, then.
If those are all defined in terms of CEV (subjective experience? really? I’m not sure I want to know how you managed that one, nor humanity or reality), then what’s left for CEV to be defined in terms of?
Ok, granted, I used a kind of odd definition of “definition” in the above post, but the end result is the same; The model I use to reason about all LW type things (and most other things as well) consists of exactly two parts; Mathematical structures, and the utility function the math matters according to. The later one is synonymous to CEV as closely as I can determine. Every concept that can’t be directly reduced to 100% pure well defined math much be caused by the utility function and thus removing that removes all those concepts. (obviously this is a simplification but that’s the general structure of it.)
You have an interim definition that does not rely on CEV or FAI of personhood that you can use to distinguish the persons from the non-persons who appear before you, do you not?
Hmm, updating on this I’d guess I a very wide Range of Phenomena, but maybe
normal or possibly even worse worse speed.
What you’d need to know is what counts as normal for the population you think you’re part of, and not for people in general. I’m not sure I have that information, apart from this broad generalization:
-In stage 2, range is not very wide, speed is very high
-in stage three, range is pretty wide, speed is much less than stage 2
-in stage 4, range is extremely wide, speed is variable but not as high as stage 2
People who don’t meditate seem to have range being narrow and speed being lower than any of the stages, but I’m not completely sure.
Also I never said I were alone in this. In fact we already know of two individuals that
show these symptoms just in the pool of people who have read this thread.
Adelene did not assert that she was outside the model (like you did), but only that she thought she was partially enlightened without ever having formally meditated. That is completely consistent with the model. Her results on the cessation-of-consciousness test agree with what the model would predict for such a person. She claims that her everyday experience is similar to stage four (or mode four perception), which agrees with what I asserted about partial enlightenment (in Part 2).
Let me know if you try the cessation-of-consciousness test and are interested in sharing what happened.
About your experience, I’m not sure I’m following. Let me take a step back. You say that “location” means x,y,z coordinates. Before, you wrote
“I know that some kind of events take place inside my brain...and some happen
outside of my brain, but other than location they don’t seem any different and I get
information about them through the same channel not sorted into two different
piles like most people do.
If you visualize purple monkeys, what is the location of that and how do you know? Given how you know it, why does that method of knowing result in it seeming different than e.g. the way your feet look, on the basis of location, but not on any other basis?
Location doesn’t sort into two piles, it sorts into an infinite amount of piles
arranged in a hierarchy.
It seems that you’re not talking about your actual experience (unless you assert that there is an actual infinity somewhere in your experience)?
I’m not sure what would be an “appropriate” response, visualizing is an action,
output not input, and also “how do you feel” tends to be after longer term trends rather than the exact moment,
People can visualize spontaneously. (cf. e.g. hypnagogic imagery, daydreaming, other stuff).
Someone can say “I was happy for hours but all of a sudden I felt sad” and that makes sense.
Could “I feel purple monkeys” be an accurate response to “how do you feel this very second?” in the way that “I feel sad” could be, if you hadn’t been visualizing purple monkeys for a long stretch leading up to the question? If so, it might be interesting to you to investigate how your experience differs from most people’s, just for the sake of self-understanding.
I’d also guess the incidental skills and effects are probably involved in the stages
phenomena.
My guess is that most of how the stages present is downstream from second-order recognizing and unmodeled personal factors, though ‘concentration’ can make a big difference here when formally meditating.
My working definition is somehting like “an agent that a correct and fully informed
implementation of CEV would assign subjective experience and care about for it’s
own sake.”.
According to your working definition, you don’t know whether you count as a person, and are very far from knowing.
But this doesn’t help, since you previously asserted that you are not one, and seemed to indicate that it has something to do with your ongoing “lack of self” experience.
Assuming what you meant was that you assume or believe with high probability that a good implementation of CEV would not count you as a person, why do you think so?
I’d love to continue it, as long as it’s understood I’m mostly guessing and won’t be very coherent. I’d strongly prefer to do it through more private channels thou.
From my experience, it seems that the core skill related to enlightenment is “second-order recognizing” (with two aspects: speed, and range of phenomena that it has access to), and everything else is downstream from it. Other skills built in meditation seem to be either to be incidental or merely helpful in developing second-order recognizing.
In light of that, I would not be so quick to assume some kind of personal uniqueness in terms of the model I laid out, especially given that that kind of thinking does seem to be a common human bias.
Right, I wouldn’t take psychological problems as evidence for being in stage three, unless there was additional evidence for that. Psychological problems are common enough.
If you intuitively and self-evidently see some phenomena as happening outside and some phenomena happening inside, which is what “[...]other than location they don’t seem any different[...]” means to me, that seems precisely to be sorting phenomena into two different piles. As if they come pre-tagged with “location” data.
As a long-time meditator, I don’t recognize phenomena as intuitively or self-evidently “inside” or “outside” or “neither inside nor outside” or “both inside and outside.” That entire classificatory scheme has ceased to exist for me. (In some ways I lack the ability to conceptualize what it would mean, although I remember that it used to mean something to me.) There is no location tag, and there is no empty field where the location tag would be. Of course, my model of the world tells me that some phenomena (sensory experience) represent stuff in the external world (albeit produced produced “inside,” through brain activity), while other phenomena (cognition) merely represent the activity of my brain, but that is just a model, something which can be altered for all sorts of reasons, and not the default way that my experience is parsed.
How would you really know what’s inside your brain and what’s outside your brain, except by applying an explicit detailed model of how the world works? Is that what you’re doing when sorting phenomena? Or are you using some more primitive way to sort (e.g. “sort by location tag”)? Because sorting by the application of a model is not a low-level cognitive process, and has all the implications for what that sorting is like which follow from not being a low-level cognitive process.
Apart from this, I’m not sure why you think thoughts and imagery and feelings are synonymous. If someone asked you how you felt, do you think “visualizing purple monkeys” could be an appropriate response? (Are you a synaesthete?)
My guess is that this refers to the explicit sorting by the application of a model; for you, things come tagged by location, and you can choose to use the location tag to sort phenomena, or you can simply not sort.
So, unless I’m wildly misunderstanding you, my guess is that you aren’t partially enlightened. But, who knows. Have you tried the cessation-of-consciousness test I described to Adelene?
As far as I can tell, “me” and “I” correspond to things in the world, or at least, there is a way to interpret them so that they do. They may not correspond to anything ontologically unique, but they definitely do describe features of the functioning of a physical system (your brain / body complex in relation to its environment) as precisely as might be expected from natural language terms.
What you’re describing sounds to me like some kind of dissociative state.
In your opinion, what are you missing that would make you an actual person? The feeling of being an actual person formed of processes that cohere? (regarding my “dissociative state” guess.)
I can assure you (with high probability) that most people you run into would consider you an actual person rather than a sequence of unrelated processes, regardless of whether or not you feel like an actual person. I’m sure (with high probability) that you recognize that all the processes in your experience function together in a precise, finely-tuned way, which is how you’re managing to have this conversation with me, and handle the rest of your life. So what’s missing?
Hmm, updating on this I’d guess I a very wide Range of Phenomena, but maybe normal or possibly even worse worse speed. I’d also guess the incidental skills and effects are probably involved in the stages phenomena.
Also I never said I were alone in this. In fact we already know of two individuals that show these symptoms just in the pool of people who have read this thread.
Everything>thisUniverse>earth>home>armoksBrain>visualCortex
Everything>thisUniverse>earth>home>armoksStomac Everything>thisUniverse>earth>home>desktop>harddrive>documentsFolder Everything>thisUniverse>earth>USA>EliezersBrain>MoRverse>harrysBrain>modelOfQuirelsBrain>modelOfHarrysBrain>modelOfQuirelsBrain>auditoryCrotex Everything>algebra>sin(x)>thirdInflectionPointToTheLeftFromOrigo etc.
The concept of applying tags to things that are not part of my model of the world makes no sense. An outside datastream becoming integrated into the model is what “sensory experience” MEANS. Same thing with like half the concepts you are referencing. “know” is defined as a part of the model that is trusted.
I’m not sure what would be an “appropriate” response, visualizing is an action, output not input, and also “how do you feel” tends to be after longer term trends rather than the exact moment, but if I had been doing nothing but that for hours “I feel purple monkeys.” would be a perfectly valid response. It’s weird, but that’s because the actual state it describes is weird.
My working definition is somehting like “an agent that a correct and fully informed implementation of CEV would assign subjective experience and care about for it’s own sake.”.
I strongly suggest that you start tabooing CEV, both in this conversation and in your thoughts. Trying to use a concept that’s as poorly defined as that generally is in such a basic way carries a significant risk of leading to some very, very confused ways of thinking.
That sounds like a good idea, but I have no idea how to actually implement it since it refers to a somehting I know is defined, but can only guess at the definition of.
I expect you can taboo the term in the regular sense even if you can’t taboo it in the rationalist sense. (Yes, this will mean re-doing your definition. I expect that that will be beneficial.)
So I’d be just saying “Friendly AI” instead? I don’t see how that’s going to change anything except being even vaguer.
No; the concept of Friendly AI depends on the concept of CEV, so a proper tabooing (in either sense) of the concept of CEV would affect that, too.
You know how your mind returns an ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ error when asked direct questions about your self, since it doesn’t use that concept? What I’m suggesting is that you remove concepts such that it returns that same error when asked direct questions about CEV, and re-answer DavidM’s question using only the remaining concepts. You can rebuild the CEV concept, if you want, but I suggest you do so in a way that allows you to rationalist-taboo it.
I am unable to remove the Friendly AI concept without destroying the concepts of “good”, “bad”, “value”, “person”, “worthwhile”, “preferable”, “person”, “concious”, “subjective experience”, “humanity”, “reality”, “meaning”, etc. the list just goes on and on and on. They’re all directly or indirectly defined in therms of it. Further, since without those there is no reason for truth to be preferable to falsehood with this removed any model of my mind won’t try to optimize for it and just turns to gibberish.
Ouch. Okay, the above advice is probably too late to be useful at all, then.
If those are all defined in terms of CEV (subjective experience? really? I’m not sure I want to know how you managed that one, nor humanity or reality), then what’s left for CEV to be defined in terms of?
Math?
Ok, granted, I used a kind of odd definition of “definition” in the above post, but the end result is the same; The model I use to reason about all LW type things (and most other things as well) consists of exactly two parts; Mathematical structures, and the utility function the math matters according to. The later one is synonymous to CEV as closely as I can determine. Every concept that can’t be directly reduced to 100% pure well defined math much be caused by the utility function and thus removing that removes all those concepts. (obviously this is a simplification but that’s the general structure of it.)
You have an interim definition that does not rely on CEV or FAI of personhood that you can use to distinguish the persons from the non-persons who appear before you, do you not?
What you’d need to know is what counts as normal for the population you think you’re part of, and not for people in general. I’m not sure I have that information, apart from this broad generalization:
-In stage 2, range is not very wide, speed is very high
-in stage three, range is pretty wide, speed is much less than stage 2
-in stage 4, range is extremely wide, speed is variable but not as high as stage 2
People who don’t meditate seem to have range being narrow and speed being lower than any of the stages, but I’m not completely sure.
Adelene did not assert that she was outside the model (like you did), but only that she thought she was partially enlightened without ever having formally meditated. That is completely consistent with the model. Her results on the cessation-of-consciousness test agree with what the model would predict for such a person. She claims that her everyday experience is similar to stage four (or mode four perception), which agrees with what I asserted about partial enlightenment (in Part 2).
Let me know if you try the cessation-of-consciousness test and are interested in sharing what happened.
About your experience, I’m not sure I’m following. Let me take a step back. You say that “location” means x,y,z coordinates. Before, you wrote
If you visualize purple monkeys, what is the location of that and how do you know? Given how you know it, why does that method of knowing result in it seeming different than e.g. the way your feet look, on the basis of location, but not on any other basis?
It seems that you’re not talking about your actual experience (unless you assert that there is an actual infinity somewhere in your experience)?
People can visualize spontaneously. (cf. e.g. hypnagogic imagery, daydreaming, other stuff).
Someone can say “I was happy for hours but all of a sudden I felt sad” and that makes sense.
Could “I feel purple monkeys” be an accurate response to “how do you feel this very second?” in the way that “I feel sad” could be, if you hadn’t been visualizing purple monkeys for a long stretch leading up to the question? If so, it might be interesting to you to investigate how your experience differs from most people’s, just for the sake of self-understanding.
My guess is that most of how the stages present is downstream from second-order recognizing and unmodeled personal factors, though ‘concentration’ can make a big difference here when formally meditating.
According to your working definition, you don’t know whether you count as a person, and are very far from knowing.
But this doesn’t help, since you previously asserted that you are not one, and seemed to indicate that it has something to do with your ongoing “lack of self” experience.
Assuming what you meant was that you assume or believe with high probability that a good implementation of CEV would not count you as a person, why do you think so?
I am feeling very confused right now, and suddenly very uncertain about all this stuff.
I could guess, but the most honest answer to most of these is simple “I don’t know.”.
Fair enough. These issues can definitely be confusing.
If you’d like to pick up on this conversation in the future (or restart it), feel free.
I’d love to continue it, as long as it’s understood I’m mostly guessing and won’t be very coherent. I’d strongly prefer to do it through more private channels thou.
No problem. Send me a message and let me know what’s on your mind.