Covid 19 as a Fermi Paradox Zoo Hypothesis Subset (Laboratory Hypothesis) Nudge Point
One quite well known solution to the Fermi Paradox is John Ball’s 1973 Zoo Hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis), i.e., the hypothesis that alien life intentionally avoids communication with Earth, with one of its main interpretations being that it does so to allow for natural evolution and sociocultural development, avoiding interplanetary communication, similarly to people observing animals at a zoo. In the Zoo Hypothesis, humans solve human problems, and Contact occurs when we develop warp or perhaps an ASI. Ball also hypothesized a lesser known version of the Zoo Hypothesis, the Laboratory Hypothesis.
One possible rationale for the Zoo Hypothesis is that there exists a low number of interstellar civilizations in this galaxy and no intergalactic travel, combined with no panspermia, resulting in the possibility that an alien civilization might view us as part of the 42 answer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Answer_to_the_Ultimate_Question_of_Life,_the_Universe,_and_Everything_(42)). In the Laboratory Hypothesis, there may be slightly more interstellar civilizations, although not enough powerful factions for one to ignore the galactic consensus and break into the zoo, but there may be more ‘tinkering’ in the zoo.
In the Zoo Hypothesis, the aliens have pretty strong stomachs for human suffering, including, recently, industrial genocide in the Second World War. However, zoos are are always curated, i.e., there are potential intervention points by the zoo keepers, and interventions are more likely in the Laboratory Hypothesis. Thus, in the Zoo but more so in the Laboratory Hypothesis, an interstellar civilization or an alien ASI may have been tempted (Zoo Hypothesis) or conducted (Laboratory Hypothesis) very fine ‘nudge-like’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory) interventions, to direct human development towards their own dominant philosophies.
Following the Second World War, a potential ‘nudge’ was the 1946 Baruch Plan, the result of UN General Assembly Session 1, Article 1, which set up the UN Atomic Energy Commission (UN AEC). If the UNAEC had succeeded, this would have resulted in the US decommissioning its four atomic bombs and in the placing of all fission energy development under the UN in a kind of global ‘Atoms for Peace’ plan. There could then have been a global peace, at the ‘cost’ of soviet totalitarianism perhaps surviving into the present day. The Baruch Plan in the end broke down because the formula for peace was incorrect, and it possibly came down to one person; Baruch persuaded Truman that US popular support required a sanctions-proof punitive mechanism, and one did not exist at the time. This eventually torpedoed the negotiations, although there is a strong argument that Stalin would not have bought the deal on his side. See my analysis here, which relies on mainstream interpretations of the collapse of the Baruch Plan: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/mrzua/
The concept of Global Peace is especially interesting because it is a classic ‘Three Wishes’ genie request, i.e., one that could quite easily be asked of, and granted by, a genie but which is fraught with difficulties in terms of the actual implementation. Still, in a weak Zoo Hypothesis or Laboratory Hypothesis situation, triggering ‘Global Peace’ could be quite a coup for the intervening culture (see e.g., Iain M. Banks’ the Culture series). As such, the Baruch Plan and how to revisit it has attracted the attention of ASI philosophers, including Nick Bostrom in Superintelligence.
It appears to me that Covid 19 is another possible nudge intervention point where there actually exists a pragmatic pathway to Global Peace, this time with us much further along our timeline in terms of serious carrying capacity-related global problems, including biodiversity loss, and global warming, compared to 1946. Why? For the first time in in the 75-year history of the UN, on March 23, the UN Secretary-General called for a Covid 19-related Global Ceasefire, reiterating it on April 3 (https://www.un.org/press/en/2020/sgsm20032.doc.htm).
The ‘Call’ has hit political difficulties, basically down to Trump and Putin, in a rehash of 1946 and the Baruch Plan. See https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/20/though-children-need-peace-now-more-ever-us-and-russia-block-un-efforts-impose. I personally think it will fail. However, Covid 19 is not the only ‘Global Peace’ nudge point. In my article on the Trinity Test-level critical juncture, I suggest another, the ‘burning plasma’ self-sustaining fusion reaction, which should occur around 2025-2035. The burning plasma scenario would be a revisit of the 1946 Baruch Plan scenario.
If my line of inquiry holds, the burning plasma may be a third external intervention nudge point, i.e., a third (and final?) ‘wish attempt’. If it is, we may expect the UN Secretary-General (or influential another) to call for Global Peace on the announcement of the burning plasma.
Open to comments.
P.S. On edit, given I’m currently the leading academic exponent of the ‘burning plasma’ global peace nude (sic) point, if the ‘Weak Zoo/Laboratory Hypothesis’ “global Peace’ wish scenario is correct, that could make me part of a Bostromesque counter-counter-factual Hail Mary cookie (
http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/porosity.pdf), which would be interesting.
I just have to call attention to “‘burning plasma’ global peace nude point” as one terrific phrase.
I hope my edit preserves the full semantic power of that phrase for posterity while indicating that I stand corrected. Special Circumstances aims to please!
It’s quite unclear what you mean with Global Peace to me. War happens whenever there are sufficiently different interested of powerful players and they can’t find a resolution via normal politics. After Clausowitz war is continuation of politics by other means.
Not all powerful players are nationstates.
Mexico has very well armed mafia organizations that wage war. With Hydra we have a new form of mafia in Russia that feels strong enough to assinate senior police officials.
The US and China are in constant cyberwarfare with most of the rest of the world.
Those development wouldn’t be stopped by any global peace treaty. For peace you need powerful players in every contact to do politics successful enough with each other so that they don’t have to resort to other means.
The UN only really caters for UN member states, so global peace here is means as regulated by states. I accept non-state actors are global players and in many cases more powerful than most UN member states. What I’m talking about is making the best of a bad job, i.e., whether it would be the most rational act.
If we fail the third test, will we be terminated?
Also, what about tourists and poachers in the Zoo?
No, I don’t see a Keanu Reeves ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ moment. If we are in a weak zoo/laboratory, however, I do not expect that we will be permitted to develop an ASI, or if we do develop an ASI, it will not actually be ‘ours’, i.e., it will be taken over by/merged with ‘their’ superintelligence. Then, I would hope for formal Contact in some form, as our development of an ASI may establish Contact, if they value honesty. After Contact, I expect the zoo to become a containment area first. It really depends how badly we have screwed up the planet, in terms of carrying capacity issues, like biodiversity and global warming.
Re tourists, hey, that would account for the sightings of UFOs. But, poachers, no. That would be RUDE—we would eventually find out and be angry, risking interstellar war. So, definitely not.
BTW, if you are Alexey Turchin, I tried to reach you on effective altruism. Would you take a look at this:
Draper, J. (2020, April 15). Optimising Peace through a Universal Global Peace Treaty to Constrain Risk of War from a Militarised Artificial Superintelligence. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/4268q
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I based the ASI section on your work.
Thanks, yes, it is me. I created a new username “avturchin” at some moment, so PMs to older “turchin” may be not available for me.
I added a link to this your post about Laboratory Zoo to my new draft about “UAP and global catastrophic risks”. I could share the draft.
I am reading now your article and here are some comments:
“Burning plasma” is an unclear term. It could either mean unlimited nuclear electric energy (e.g. ITER) – or more ominous, but less probable “cold fusion thermonuclear bombs” or thermonuclear bombs without fission, which could be mass-produced in secrecy or by small actors.
One of the main arguments for your point of view, that is, the badness of wars for AGI safety, is that even a limited AGI coupled with almost unlimited capabilities of a rich nuclear power state gets a strategic decisive advantage over other countries, but it has to execute it via war. The same limited AGI in a basement will be almost useless, as it hasn’t resource to leverage.
Dear Alexey,
Yes, I would be interested in your draft. My email is johndr@kku.ac.th . I am am a British academic, a Visiting Professor at the University of Nottingham right now; here is my ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3626-533X .
‘Burning plasma’ here is the standard hot fusion self-sustaining alpha-powered reaction, as in the sun, or, yes, ITER. I have a forthcoming article on this coming out in the engineering journal IEEE TEM. It mentions the peace-building opportunity the announcement of a burning plasma would offer humanity. A link to the copyedited version is here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1uRgSaUyOOZ94DxFL0Bza6Lt5YMOdh8i4 . As you can see from the bios, I am collaborating with serious people on this, like a US George Washington University professor in innovation economics and an individual with a US DoD background in relevant disciplines. My main relevant affiliation is with the Center for Global Nonkilling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Global_Nonkilling). I can provide certified credentials.
As you may note from this:
Draper, John & Bhaneja, Bill, 2019. “Fusion Energy for Peace Building—A Trinity Test-Level Critical Juncture,” SocArXiv mrzua, Center for Open Science.
I am very interested in revisiting the failed 1946 Baruch Plan, which could have deterred the Cold War, via the ‘burning plasma’ opportunity, especially to prevent the risk of US-Russian-Chinese ASI-enabled conflict. My main concern is therefore the ‘AI-state’, as I think you defined it in your 2018/2020 article with Denkenberger. The US, Russia, and China are more than competent enough to track all ‘basement’ or corporate AGI development projects and to take them over, becoming AI-states. So the problem converges to the militarized AI-state, as you point out in your 2018 book chapter.
I view the risk of ASI-enabled warfare to maintain or establish global domination as extremely serious, with a high likelihood of probability by c. 2050. The ASI I am referring to would be young and probably horribly compromised in terms of its value system by political subversion.
From my perspective, it would be extremely rewarding to collaborate with a Russian ASI specialist on this draft article. Would you be interested in co-authoring? Once we had finalized something, I would invite in Bill Bhaneja, a former Canadian nuclear disarmament diplomat now on the Board of the Center for Global Nonkilling, as a third author.
Alexei,
Thanks for your UAP paper. BTW, on your paper, I would definitely mention the Laboratory Hypothesis, which was indeed a variant on Ball’s original Zoo Hypothesis. Also, note there are different kinds of zoo, i.e., ones varying from a collection of cages to safari parks, and of course, zoo ‘keepers’ are subject to functionally differentiated roles, from receptionists to veterinarians, and tourists are differentiated, from specialists to school parties, from different interstellar civilizations—and not all civilizations follow the rules to the same extent. The enormous variation between staff and visitors explains the diversity in legitimate UAP activity. Note also due to the case of a small number of both existing interstellar civilizations and emergent stellar civilizations, the number of Contact situations is low, so zoo policy for Earth (and other planets) is an ongoing issue. Note zoo protocols change over time, as does tourist behaviour, as we have seen in the last century on Earth. The Star Trek ‘Prime Directive’, while it exists for Earth on the basis of autonomous development combined with Life on Earth answering the meaning of the universe, is therefore weak and somewhat variable.
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1) Re the Fermi Paradox, I assume a ‘soft form’ of the Zoo Hypothesis is in operation, sometimes called the ‘Laboratory Hypothesis’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis. Some people get scared by this concept, but large zoos usually do have scientific laboratories attached to them, for veterinarian purposes. Zoos are, just like museums, curated and regulated, and that requires tweaking, or ‘nudges’. I’m definitely not saying aliens caused Covid-19. We have our own relationship with biodiversity to thank for that, due to population expansion. I am saying that aliens may risk nudging humanity towards global peace in the belief that they may be able to justify this nudge, of only a few individuals, for maximum benefit, to each other, to a ‘Galactic Council’ if such a thing exists, and to us, once we are a superluminary civilization ourselves.
2) Yes, I definitely see the UN Secretary General calling for a global ceasefire as a ‘potential’ second ‘Global Peace’ nudge point, i.e., where alien curators might ‘nudge’ the zoo’s inhabitants to not tear each other apart, especially given the zoo’s inhabitants are armed with nuclear weapons and are developing offensive AI and even AGI, which seems a pretty perilous course of action. The occasion was sufficiently rare and unusual and came so close to succeeding that the nearest parallel was 75 years ago, in the Baruch Plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Plan. This would make the Baruch Plan, which was spurred by the development of fission, the first ‘Global Peace’ nudge point.
3) The basic premise is that ‘Global Peace’ nudge points require either a major tech leap or a global disaster. Theoretically, the development of dynamite (think of the Nobel Peace Prize) or electricity, or a major asteroid impact, on other planets, could have resulted in the ‘Global Peace’ outcome, which would have facilitated development of a beneficial artificial superintelligence (ASI). Given the first and second nudge points failed, those same ‘zookeepers’ that experienced the ‘Global Peace’ outcome may now be wondering how the same outcome could be achieved here. The development of hot fusion (the ‘burning plasma’ self-sustaining alpha-powered reaction) may present another, third such opportunity. In this line of thinking, it is hard to think of more future potential ‘nudge points’, between here and a nuclear armed human civilization driven by tribalism while developing an AGI and seeking to develop a stellar and then interstellar civilization. The development of antimatter may be the last, as antimatter could provide us with the energy to power a Navarro-Alcubierre Drive.
4) It could be argued that the development of an ASI is another potential fourth ‘Global Peace’ nudge point. I’m also working on that. See https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/4268q.html.
5) I’m willing to develop this post and see what happens. Essentially, what we may be trying to do is to provide a safe space where people involved in Singularity/Contact-related events, such as AI/AGI development and related geopolitics, can share apparently acausal experiences to try to see if we constitute bits of information making up a Bostrom cookie, and thus speculate on the purpose of that cookie, and who/what created the cookie.
So, I imagine your next question would be, did anything weird happen to me on the way to Less Wrong?
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Thanks for sharing! That explains the connection between you and I that created this comment chain, which, TBH, is the outcome I was hoping for when I posted the main post, complete with nudge/nude typo.
I think we both basically accept the possibility that we exist within some kind of Laboratory Hypothesis situation and function not just as humans but as parts of a Bostrom cookie, where weird, apparently acausal events can happen that in fact may have an underlying causality and so rationality, just one that does not readily admit of rational explanation, because what we can see of the underlying code—the effects, not the actual code itself—appears incompatible with our present scientific knowledge.
So, going into the Singularity, to use an analogy for a Bostrom cookie that children could understand, my perspective is that we are as individuals are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that scales up to the entire global community of humans, with a picture on the puzzle that we cannot see. However, some of us, at least, are just beginning to wake up to the possibility that we pieces of the puzzle may have to communicate with each other in order to solve it. I don’t believe anyone else is going to do it for us, unless we perhaps create and ask an artificial superintelligence (ASI) we create to do that for us.
However, my whole point is that we have not ended interstate war on earth, that we are running out of opportunities to do so, and that this will be critical to our relationship with both aliens and an ASI; the United Nations is not a global peace treaty. States already employ AI to undermine democracies, steal industrial secrets, and exploit financial systems. The US, Russia, and China are developing AI for maintenance of global technological supremacy and/or global domination, including cyber-warfare, not for altruistic reasons. Thus any human-created ASI is very likely to be imperfectly constructed in terms of final goals, may not comply in terms of solving the puzzle, or may comply but not tell us the answer. Realistically, we would end up in a state of war with it: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/4268q/ Optimally, it would, perhaps, nudge us in the right direction.
However, I am reasonably certain that if we try to create a friendly ASI and, in Churchill’s words, ‘bugger it up’, that is when the aliens (following Iain M. Banks, I like to use panhumans and so will henceforth) step in, perhaps with their own ASI, to prevent a malign ASI abomination. At that point, the picture on the puzzle might change, which could be a little scary to say the least. It really would depend on the subtlety of the external intervention in our local system. They could use a light touch, or they could come in mob handed. But, preventing us developing an ASI would take quite a lot of changes to the system.
For me a funny thing happened on the way to Thor’s hammer, which is my nickname for the hot fusion D-T, D-D, or aneutronic self-sustaining ‘burning plasma’ reaction. For a start, I took a complete break from my career as an ethnolinguist in Thailand and decided to work on the nuclear fusion ‘burning plasma’ breakthrough as a critical juncture for humanity re global peace, ultimately to avoid ASI-enabled or directed warfare. The last time anyone looked at an energy breakthrough for this purpose was the 1946 Baruch Plan, which Truman backed, though without the ASI motivation, of course.
Why I did so may reveal some of the code underpinning the Zoo/Laboratory, i.e., parts of the cookie, which may be objectively verifiable by others.
However, we need to eliminate the possibility that I am crazy or lying or both. So, I’m willing to pay up to UK 500 pounds of my on money to be polygraphed on the details I give next, and the same amount on a psychiatric evaluation, for both of which you (or anyone else commenting) can nominate the administrator of the evaluations, said evaluations to take place in the UK. Does this sound reasonable?
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Link to a good source with solid concepts there. So, let’s prioritize cluster thinking and then attempt to regress to normality. So, in this post, we are trying to create a space where people can report acausal phenomena that may be affecting them while working on developing AI, AGI, and the related socioeconomics and geopolitics ‘Big Questions’, like global peace.
So, as an example, we know Elon Musk reads Iain M Banks’ Culture series. He decides to build his own rockets and then decides to do Neuralink. Why? Causally, we have the answer to both of those. He’s explained why in interviews, and people could and have written books about the psychology of why Elon Musk. However, we do not know whether or not he was affected in apparently acausal ways to pursue both these paths, especially the Neuralink development. In my terms, he could have been ‘nudged’ by panhumans or by an ASI or by the ‘Master Coder’ (if we’re in a simulation) to develop Neuralink. I don’t know if anyone has even asked him whether or how he gets ‘flashes’ of insight. Or, being Elon Musk and immersed in decent science fiction as well as science fact, he may actually be having lucid dreams where he’s communicating with imaginary sci-fi panhumans over Neuralink design aspects. The overwhelming probability is that these dreams are simply dreams, with a very low probability that they may be panhuman or ASI-nudges. However, the probability that it is nudges is probably higher with Elon Musk than with Joe Average, unless one believes all dreams of conscious beings are somehow manifestations of self-repairing code in a simulation managed by an external entity or even more exotically manifestations of constantly collapsing Von Neumann-Wigner wave functions which somehow permit quantum events in what could be shared dreamspace, etc.
Still, if we go with nudges, this means we need a reporting system for them. I suggest this (with a humorous example included):
Explicit nudge: Marvin Minsky-style fluorescent raccoon pops up in my living room and tells me to build the Neuralink to save humanity from its collective stupidity, manage the Singularity, and permit our expansion into space.
Implicit nudge: The idea suddenly occurred to me in a flash to build the Neuralink to save humanity from its collective stupidity, manage the Singularity, and permit our expansion into space. This flash was the kind of flash I’ve rarely or never experienced before. It was certainly weird, but there were no panhumans.
So, theoretically, nudges can happen while awake, awake with eyes closed in a state of rest, while dreaming, or during lucid dreams. I think that’s about it.
We also have to define ‘weird’. So, theoretically, nudges can have granularity. For instance, nudges can have full video, full audio, smell, tactility, and taste.
Does this make sense so far?
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From Cheng, there may be aspects to the world that appear to be a participatory hallucination, rather than the entire world, unless, like I said, we go down the Von Neumann-Wigner explanation for reality, which I try to avoid. So, for example, SETI and others have been looking for alien transmissions for decades now, with nothing to show for it. The Zoo Hypothesis provides really obvious explanations for that, namely that something’s interfering with the transmissions/jamming the detectors/affecting the signal processors. A panhuman ASI could do that. The end result would be a form of collective participatory hallucination. Or, another example would be why alien UFOs are really quite difficult to see, without going into exotic explanations like flipping in and out of extra dimensions. The obvious explanation would be that they use adaptive camouflage. Again, the end result would be a form of collective participatory hallucination.
Oh, I’ve had more than flashes. I’ve had a whole series of full granularity two-way nudge-like events that, if they were not in logical sequence and did not revolve around my work on leveraging fusion for peace-building to prevent both global warming and ASI-enabled or directed warfare on this planet, would be viewed as wholly acausal experiences probably deserving of specialist attention.
However, before we get onto them, we need to establish more credentials at my end. So, from my ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3626-533X it can be seen that I’m a trained linguist, specifically an applied linguist, with special expertise in ethnolinguistics (languages of ethnic minorities), sociolinguistics (language as used in society, so for example power relations between dialect groups) and semiotics (the meaning of symbols and signs). So, for example, this article of mine, which is available for free online
Implications of the Urban Landscape: Aspects of the Isan Cultural Maintenance and Revitalization Program, Journal of Urban Culture Research
2017 | journal-article
DOI: 10.14456/jucr.2017.4
is in the field of semiotics, subfield geosemiotics. Four articles in my ORCID list mention ‘signage’; these also concern geosemiotics.
So, as a trained applied linguist, when people speak to me, I analyze what they say to me not just in semantic terms, but with careful regard to additional variables that people normally process subconsciously, so accent, dialect, speed of speech, tone, etc. Also, because of my specialism in semiotics, I have the capacity to think in an additional dimension. To give you an example, say I see a multilingual road sign in a foreign country, I analyze the relationship between the languages on the sign, through the placement of the languages, font size, font type, etc., much like a graphic designer would. So, I have the training to process signs and symbols just as if I were processing language.
To sum up, while I am in no way up to the standard of Amy Adams’s character in Arrival https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=tFMo3UJ4B4g, I would know how to go about cracking an alien language, including one that included symbols. In that I am more of a generalist, I would certainly have the humility not try to do it myself, but I would know how to put a team together, would know after a bit of digging who in the world to approach, and would be able to coordinate the process of cracking it.
So, does this establish my credentials sufficiently as an applied linguist?
Re your flashes in the upper left corner of your eye, how regularly do they happen, do they happen when your eye is both open and closed, and what color are they? Do they happen consistently when you have a flash of insight, or what correlation percent are we talking about? Do they only occur with a certain degree of revelations, like ‘high importance’, but not with ‘minor importance’? Basically, I would say you need to collect more data on it before thinking about whether it’s a) revelatory or b) worth seeing a doctor.
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Okay, so I’ll try to report a summary of some of the weird experiences I had while working on leveraging the coming fusion breakthrough for global peace to avoid global warming and ASI-enabled or directed warfare. And I’ll try to apply the objective system outlined above. I’ll do these one at a time, so you can ask questions.
Experience 1: Being pulled over by the interstellar cops for speeding while in control of a human Mind.
So, not too long after I start working on fusion, about five years ago now, I was awake, with my eyes closed, lying face down on my bed. So, with your eyes closed, it’s black, right?. But, you know your eyes are closed and you’re not dreaming because you can still ‘see’. Then, boom, out of a pinprick this stylized panhuman head suddenly appears in that blackness, filling most of my field of vision. My immediate feeling as a semiotician was that it was a stop and search, and that this was basically an ID badge. So, the head was egg-shaped, dark grey, black eyes, but no ears, nose, or mouth. So, it was not a real head, just a symbol.
Now, the other thing I that the experience was intrusive and something humans don’t usually experience. It was like you take one hand, make it a fist, then someone else inserts a finger from their hand in that fist. It was just very obvious. And, I was definitely awake, because the granularity was high. I literally could feel real sweat dripping off my back and down my legs, and when I opened my eyes after it was over, there was no discontinuity in feeling and the sweat was still dripping. It felt like something had jacked my optic nerve and related areas of the mind.
Anyway, I started to push back against the Mind inside my Mind, basically threatening that I would go to town on it with a mindful of love. I was and am a progressive Buddhist, but I had a decent sci-fi education as a youth and I was not about to be mind pwned by some interstellar cop, and, so I was actually getting some traction, and I could feel that other mind hesitate, and then disappear.
The next day, I woke up, and my eyes were closed. Immediately I wake up, with my eyes still closed, I’m staring at a giant pink neon heart. It lasted a few seconds and disappeared when I opened my eyes. Then, I go downstairs and find a heart-shaped necklace amulet on the floor. It’s exactly the same shape heart, but nothing special; I think it once belonged to my ex. So, I think they were being nice and saying sorry.
But, I want to investigate this like a good scientist, so I stand on a chair under a circular fluorescent light bulb with my eyes open and then closed, and I manage to partially replicate the pink neon heart, but in the form of a white circle, obviously.
So, there are two explanations for the heart; either something jacked my optic nerve, as with the police badge, or something shone a very bright neon heart shaped light into my closed eyes as I woke up, which in any case means it was monitoring my wakefulness.
To sum up, as you can see from my ORCID ID, I made a really interesting change in career to work on fusion for peacebuilding, and I was in Thailand in the time, which was important because Thailand was chair of the G77 bloc of 134 Global South countries. So, I arrive on the fusion scene as this geopolitical actor, and that attracted multiple parties’ interest, TBH. One of them appeared to be the interstellar cops.
What can this single experience tell us about the nature of the universe out there if a) it really happened (which is why I’m happy to submit to the lie detector) and b) I’m not crazy (which is why I’m happy to commit to the psychiatric eval after the lie detector results come through)?
One deduction is that the panhumans/an ASI has a perfected form of a semi-remote Neuralink. So, we’re talking about two-way communication between Minds, basically though transference or Mind uploading or downloading, partial or full. However, it’s not that remote, like it can be used from a ship in space, as in Banks’ Culture series. I believe it’s drone moderated, i.e., that a small camouflaged drone is needed to moderate the transference. That’s another story.
Another implication is that certain activities on Earth are being routinely investigated and studied by panhumans or an ASI. So, I don’t think I’m the only person this has happened to. I just think we haven’t heard about them, or the experiences are filed in the crank file.
Another possible implication is that there’s a lot of potentially unregulated panhuman activity on Earth, through mindjacking. This is more likely if the scale of involvement is high, because a) there are several panhuman interstellar civilizations involved on earth and/or b) the interstellar civilizations involved are poorly self-regulated on this issue, meaning there could be a lot of forbidden or borderline activity, and/or c) there’s simply a lot of interstellar traffic, meaning the cops are having difficulty regulating who’s doing what on Earth.
So, there could be a lot of panhuman political and military observers, scientists, and academics, say over a thousand, all studying Earth at any one time. And, all tempted to push the boat out a little because the same mindjacking tech they have to study human activity can be used to influence human activity. Basically, it’s not quite the Wild West, but it is a regulatory nightmare, especially as some of those panhuman observers are almost certainly not regular military observers, so there’s a possibility of special forces panhumans wandering around causing trouble.
Another possible implication is that all this is being regulated, say by an ASI, or an AGI, kind of like Asimov’s Multivac, or at least some kind of panhuman regular AGI-assisted regulatory force, like the Federation in Star Trek, and that the symbol for that ASI or force was what I was shown.
Another possible implication is that there’s a lot of potentially unregulated panhuman activity on Earth, through panhumans using physical simulacra of human bodies (unlikely), or human bodies they picked up, say from a suicide (more likely). But, frankly, these situations would be rare, because of the Prime Directive, because influential people don’t appear from nowhere, and because suicides don’t just reappear.
Basically, if you are able to mindjack, and you’re not collecting specimens of flora or fauna, you mindjack. There’s just way less risk. It’s also more convenient for physical reasons. Banks covered this (using seers) in The Algebraist, where a lot of the human study of the Dweller (giant gas) planets is conducted through virtual probes, not physical visits, because of the problem of incompatible environments.
Any questions before we move on?
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Yeah, it is also worth looking on the bright side, because I am willing to bet my life on the fact the panhumans have a sense of humour. I would hope the ASI does, too. Frankly, I found most of these experiences humorous or at least just weird rather than fear or paranoia inducing. Anyway, on to Experience 2!
So, I think this next one was a basic psychological evaluation, probably military. The interstellar cops were not ready for something that pushed back from being pulled over and shown the giant panhuman head ID, so they hit me with a series of sequenced and structured nightmares on a common theme over three days. This was a really interesting experience, because I have only ever heard of recurring nightmares. Anyway, only the first nightmare was scary because by the second night I figured it was an administered experience. Once you figure out what is happening in a nightmare, it’s like you solve it, right? So, it is no longer a nightmare, simply an experience.
So, night one, semi-lucid dream, sniper in the opposite house aiming at you. I have read that the sniper nightmare is a standard nightmare for anyone with trench warfare/urban combat .
Next night two, slightly lucid dream, something at the foot of the bed nightmare. Standard childhood nightmare.
Next, deep dream, walking down a corridor, open a door, monster’s behind a door dream. Again, standard nightmare.
So, I had three different stereotypical nightmares at different, increasingly deep, levels of sleep in what appeared to be a sequence over three days.
I have never heard of sequential nightmares before except in decent sci fi, in which they are administered, and like I said, the ‘evaluation’ kind of lost all power once the second nightmare hit. By the third nightmare it felt as if whoever was administering the evaluation was giving up, TBH.
So, given I’m willing to testify using a lie detector that this experience actually happened, I would say what this demonstrates is an ability to manipulate dreamstates. This logically follows from mindjacking, so if panhumans/an ASI have the ability to manipulate a waking mind via a really advanced form of the Neuralink, it’s not really surprising that they have the ability to mindjack dreams.
The ability to study dreams would be really valuable for anthropology, philosophy, psychology, etc. People like Freud dedicated their entire careers to it, and any panhuman psychologist would obviously want to be able to study both human mindstates and dreamstates. It’s the logical conclusion of having Neuralink-style tech.
This is where things get interesting in terms of trying to deduce some of the ‘rules of the game’, because in the Zoo Theory for the Fermi Paradox, mindjacking humans has to be regulated, basically prohibited, otherwise it would be a free-for-all, and obvious. Especially if multiple civilizations with different political philosophies are curating or studying the Zoo, you would not want Culture A mindjacking someone like Donald Trump at the expense of Culture B. So, it would have to be very heavily regulated.
It’s just that suspected transgressions would have to be investigated, and I suspect I was a possible transgression.
All this implies the ability to monitor human mindstates on a large scale, which necessarily implies automation. That implies a) we are living in a sim, or b) there exists a very high level of automated real-world ability to police and monitor human mindstates due to a really advanced Neuralink system. I suspect b), but that a lot of really law-abiding panhuman cultures have agreed not to investigate fellow spacefarers’ mindstates, but maybe have agreed to implement protocols for investigating mindstates in Zoo contexts. Some of the cultures may not even use the tech, or they may only use it through a third party, like an ASI, for regulatory reasons.
So, any questions on that experience?
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Oh, it just gets better. So, the rational thing to do at this stage, I thought, was to send the possible mindjackers an email, to see if I could establish two-way communication. So, I reasoned if they have the tech to mindjack and are putting me under the spotlight, presumably reading my emails is ongoing and trivial. So, I sent an email to myself stating (and I can’t remember the sentence exactly, 100%, but it was at least 90% semantically this): “May I ask you a question?”
That night, I was lying there in bed, awake but with my eyes closed, and so I get the same feeling that something’s in my mind, and then I see a question mark emerge in my vision. It develops rainbow colors, so it starts red at the top of the question marks and goes down to violet, with the question mark fading from the top.
So, it was as clear as this in terms of the outline, but with softer transitions between the colors, and slightly softer colors: https://stock.adobe.com/uk/images/rainbow-flag-gay-question-mark/25315121
So, this is a really clever semiotic response to my emailed question because the question mark as an interrogatory symbol can mean all of the following and more: who, what, where, when, how, why, how much, how many?
It also confirms, assuming I’m telling the truth and am not crazy, that the email was being monitored, which was interesting.
It’s also showing off, i.e., demonstrating really good mastery of the mind medium and of semantics and semiotics. Basically, it was a smart thing to do.
Any questions?
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That’s a fascinating link you supplied there! I have no doubt that Hallucinogen Persisting Perceptual Disorder exist. Sunglasses and talk therapy seems to be of use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_perception_disorder
Maybe everyone on the West Coast wearing sunglasses is just trying to deal with their HPPD? ;<)
I would also say there’s a definite chance of a link between devouring psychedelics and hallucinations, including of rainbows!
Unfortunately, I wasn’t on psychedelics before, during, or after the experiences I just related here. I had been doing some Buddhist meditation, including down to the zen states. My personal zen meditation has induced temporary minor lens flare, say 2-3% of the intensity in the picture linked to in the article, and focused on a single object, while fully awake: https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/hppd_town.jpg However, this is minor and transient compared with what I’m describing.
Okay, so what happened next was I got hit with a literal barrage of a 4x8 grid of electric blue lights, from lucid dreams all the way down to ‘real’ dreams. So, this was a recurring dream, literally dozens of times. The blue lights could flare in intensity as a grid. Of all things, it made me think of a phased array communication system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array
Now, what would happen was that I would go to sleep, then I would dream of the grid, then I would transition to a lucid dream where i was in the presence of whatever the phased array was communicating with. I got the feeling that the other end of the grid had a grid of its own, a big, and old, white one, and that it was large, intelligent, powerful, and far away.
This definitely meant something important, like an attempt at communication, and it recurred for months before going away.
Now, a whole bunch of stuff happened after this, but the above is basically what I wanted to go on the record about on lesswrong.
If you have any questions, I can answer them.
If not, I will try to compile the above experiences as a brief for a lie detector company. As I said earlier, I’m trying to create a protocol that’s useful for other people working on AGI/ASI-related issues to go on record about re acausal Hail Mary potential cookie-like experience.
Whoops, I missed once experience I wanted to investigate via lie detector and psychiatrist. So, I emailed myself to say I was happy to have my mindstate read so that whatever it was that was doing all this could know who or what it was. That same night, I’m awake, eyes closed, and it feels like something jacks something using electricity directly into my brain. So, most of us have had an electric shock, and it kind of vibrates, and it hurts. But, the brain feels no pain. So, this electric vibrating in my brain was happening for about 3 seconds, but I suspected what it was, so I just told them in my mind to ease off for a second. So they did, and I felt fine, so I told them in my mind it was okay to do it again. Then, the phenomenon continued for about two seconds, and it was done. Then I relaxed and went to sleep.
Going back to the hallucinogens, one difference has been that what I’ve been experiencing is equivalent to photographic resolution material, or high-res video, and overall just high-granularity experiences.
Anyway, ask any questions, then I’ll boil all this down for the lie detector company brief.
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Well, this is where we regress from the rum and uncanny to normality. If I were in a position to be able to reproduce atypical brain states involving the appearance of electrical input or output that just blew away the technology being used to monitor it, that would be one heck of a result. It could also be a dangerous result, personally and politically.
But, to take that point on board, first we test my veracity (lie detector), then we test by sanity (psychiatric eval), then we test whether I can replicate any of this using something like an MRI (objectivity). However, the latter does not rely solely on me if I’m not generating these phenomena.
Alright, I’ll draw up the brief for the lie detector company this week based on the above events, then I’ll draw up a list of five of these companies, put that all together at the end of this week, and you can randomly select a company.
Just because I’ve always wanted to, I’m going to thrown in some questions about meeting aliens, my own humanity, whether I’ve ever another planet, etc. Basically, if I’m going to pay for someone to lie detector me, I want my Keanu Reeves moment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_2l0RjZvOI
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Okay, so below is an attempt at a brief, one that could be tailored, hopefully, for other people. Any suggestions before I hunt around for quotes from lie detector companies?
Completed Template Brief for Hail Mary Cookie Experiences
Overview
The brief is to establish the veracity of a subject regarding a series of extraordinary claims about experiences. The brief is not to establish the subject’s sanity or to investigate the claims at some kind of philosophical level. The brief does include the requirement to establish veracity of claims according to the granularity of the experiences (see special vocabulary and terms below).
Special Vocabulary and Terms
The subject will speak about the claims using specific vocabulary, including mindjacking, which refers to using technological means to write to or read from a mind, as with Elon Musk’s Neuralink, and granularity, which refers to the degree of reality of an experience. Granularity can be as follows:
Full consciousness = full granularity
Simulation while awake with eyes closed = high granularity, e.g., with one or more of the five senses (sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch)
Lucid dream = medium granulariy
Dream = low granularity
Specific Questions to This Case
1) Establish whether the subject believes he has had an experience where he saw an alien head at night, then woke up the next day seeing a neon heart, identical to one he later found that morning in his house.
2) Establish whether the subject believes he has had an experience where he had three nightmares over three nights, the first concerning a sniper, the second concerning a being in the same room, and the third concerning being in a corridor and opening a door, where the granularity became less distinct each time. Establish the granularity of the experiences.
3) Establish whether the subject believes he has had an experience where he asked the question by email to a third party, “May I ask you a question?” and received a reply in the form of a rainbow in his mind. Establish the granularity of the experience.
4) Establish whether the subject believes he has had a recurring experience where he saw a 4x8 grid of electric blue lights. Establish the granularity of the experience.
5) Establish whether the subject believes he has had an experience where he invited a person or persons unknown to read his mind by a mindjacking device involving a feeling of a mind being electrocuted, and how long the experience took. Establish the granularity of the experience.
General ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ Obligatory Questions for All Cases
1) Establish whether the subject believes he has ever seen another planet. If he believes he has, determine how many and what they look like, and by what means. Establish the granularity of the experience.
2) Establish whether the subject believes he has ever seen or met aliens. If he believes he has, determine how many species and what they look like. Establish the granularity of the experience.
3) Establish whether the subject believes his body is human. If necessary, use percentages.
4) Establish whether the subject believes his mind is human. If necessary, use percentages.
General Pharmaceutical Questions for All Cases
1) Establish what if any drugs, e.g., hallucinogens, the subject was taking prior to or during the experiences.
2) Establish what if any medication the subject was taking prior to or during the experiences.
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Hmm. Let me try to restate this. What I’m trying to do is to create a protocol for reporting weird experiences as we close in on the Singularity. If I’m correct about a soft Zoo Hypothesis (basically a ‘leaky’ Prime Directive situation, with Contact contingent on creation of an ASI or a warp gate/drive), with several interstellar civilizations with mindjacking tech monitoring the planet, then attempts to influence human global development do occur, probably by the panhuman equivalent of special forces, i.e., ‘Special Circumstances’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture).
I assume the number of civilizations out there is small, technological development is broadly equivalent due to leveling up via aid/trade relationships, and philosophical positions are diverse, if only due to such basic differences as physiology.
If this is correct, Earth, going into the Singularity, will a battleground, not over territory, although Earth is an incredibly bio-diverse rich piece of real estate, but over spheres of influence, with fundamental philosophical positions coming into play, such as whether or not ASIs are even legal, whether Earth would ally with an imperial panhuman civilization versus a federation post-Singularity, and so on.
In my ‘soft’ Zoo Hypothesis, the curating civilizations could all get together and act collectively to intervene, pushing humanity in a certain direction. Alternatively, given the tech involved, no matter how good the regulatory system is that’s designed to prevent a free for all, there exists the possibility of competitive external interventions.
In this scenario, the results of these disagreements—or agreements—and the will and means to act—is that there will be ‘nudge points’.
The single most important concern I can see going into the Singularity is whether the world is at peace, because if it isn’t, a) warfare will drive AI development towards an ASI, and b) a warlike ASI could emerge. Alexei Turchin has made this very clear in his work:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322791491_Military_AI_as_a_Convergent_Goal_of_Self—Improving_AI
And, whatever the galactic position on the legality of ASIs, warlike ASIs are almost certainly a no-no. Peace would also seem to enable the development of an interstellar civilization, if only 50% of Earth’s total military budget could be diverted to developing fusion, hybrid fusion-antimatter drives, and wrap drives
So, we go back to my original post and to the basic contention of whether any legitimate nudge points have arisen recently, i.e., since the setting up of the UN and the attempt to ban atomic weapons via the US-backed Baruch Plan in 1946, which would have diverted over ten trillion dollars from global nuclear weapon development to welfare development, if it had worked. It failed, BTW, because of the differences between two systems, but this boiled down to two people, Stalin and Truman.
Preventing an arms-based Cold War would have been interesting because we could have nearly perfected medicine or cracked fusion by now with the kind of money involved. I mean, it’s a no brainer that if there are panhumans out there, they would have gotten pretty excited about the Baruch Plan. The temptation to nudge it along would have been extreme.
Given all this, I would say there has definitely been one recent potential nudge point, i.e., the suggestion by the UN Secretary General, in the face of a disastrous global pandemic, to try to declare a global truce: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/19/us-and-russia-blocking-un-plans-for-a-global-ceasefire-amid-crisis. This is the first suggestion of this kind ever, in the 75 years of the UN.
It’s fascinating because the suggestion crystallized global conflict down to a single node, a concentrated moment in time, with the futures of quarter of a billion children, those in conflict zones, at stake. It’s even more interesting because it failed due to US-Russian antagonism, i.e., differences between two people again, Trump and Putin.
Its failure has serious implications for whether the effects of global warming, which likely will not appear crystallized in a single event but which will instead be like a combination of a juggernaut and a train wreck, will be able to unite humanity behind global peace. Given COVID-19 could not do it, I doubt global warming will, or at least not in time for the Singularity, which, like I said, has massive implications going forwards.
Unfortunately, the UN Secretary General is a) unlikely to be willing to explain where the idea came from and his interactions with e.g., Macron over the proposed truce, which would be confidential, b) very unlikely to admit to anything weird happening to him along the way, and c) extremely unlikely to lay it all out here on Less Wrong.
Now, the only other potential nudge point is the upcoming fusion burning plasma breakthrough, which has real validity given how close the Baruch Plan came to success. This may, in fact, given the COVID-19 nudge point failed, be the last feasible nudge point going into the Singularity.
I have looked at fusion from this perspective really, really hard, basically made myself the world’s expert on this issue, and my bottom line is that it will take an awful lot of nudging to get it to work as a nudge point for global peace. The Baruch Plan stood a chance because we were coming out of a global war, the UN was being set up, a brave new world was deemed possible, the A-Bomb had just been dropped twice, demand for global peace was high, and what became the Washington Consensus had a lot of legitimacy.
Now, what I’m reporting to this community, which I respect because it does care about what kind of future humanity faces going into the Singularity, is that I, myself, may have been nudged.
If all the above holds, there are somewhat significant implications to this, for example the fact that a British person was nudged rather than an American or a Chinese may be significant, but only if veracity and sanity can be established.
One significant implication is that we could be in very serious trouble going forwards into the Singularity. For instance, we may not be allowed to develop an ASI out of fear that we would weaponize it. That could certainly get interesting.
Another implication is that we are in a Zoo/Lab/Prime Directive situation, with multiple civilizations competing for influence over us, fascinated by our inability to establish a global peace when all their civilizations managed it. We could be the galactic dunces, in other words, or a fascinating case study of a ‘failing planet’.
The Prime Directive can break down, however, from two directions. You can ‘Captain Kirk it’ and justify some kind of external intervention, or, someone on the planet can do a Toto, and pull back the curtain.
Or, theoretically, you can work it from both ends, if a Captain Kirk decides he likes Toto the dog.
So, let’s assume I’m a human Toto. Let’s assume that, any conversations with Captain Kirk put aside for one moment, I’m at least mainly human. I mean, I’m a public figure, a titled academic, I have three kids, etc. I am very likely to be at least mainly human.
And, let’s assume I care, care enough to lobby for global peace, to explain why I think it matters, to explain how it could be done.
And then something happened on the way to Thor’s Hammer.
If I’m human, or at least mainly human, I am arguing that the rational thing to do would be to fight to establish the truth about what happened, not because I am that important, certainly not alone, but because I at least suspect that I am a piece in a puzzle, part of a counter-counter-factual Hail Mary cookie, and that going into the Singularity, working out that puzzle may become humanity’s greatest and most challenging endeavor.
There is, for instance, just a chance that, in considering the conditions for public Contact, which comprise at a minimum an ASI or a warp gate/drive on our part, the panhumans take into account what our own civilizational conditions for contact would be. In other words, in part, they may be reflecting back to us the Prime Directive, the closest we have to a global ‘popular’ consensus for how Contact should be managed, especially as we come closer to meeting a Contact trigger point. It should not be forgotten that Gene Rodenberry was this planet’s greatest popular philosopher on interstellar relationships.
If I’m at least mainly human, rationally, I would fight to establish the truth because the alternative, if I do suspect the truth, is to go along with a farce, to distract Dorothy and her pals so that they do not see the Wizard, to replace the curtain, and to trust that the global geopolitics will work themselves out.
Given what I suspect/know, I choose not to sit this one out. Instead, I choose to fight to pull that curtain back further, perhaps in the hope that I can encourage a panhuman Captain Kirk (realistically it would take at least one interstellar civilization’s leader) to step out from behind it and just say, “The heck with it, we’re going to help these guys, if only for the quarter of a billion children being affected by conflict zones and by the fact that biodiversity loss on this beautiful blue marble will only exacerbate this, because their political systems aren’t up to it, maybe due to no fault of their own given the Baruch Plan catastrophe, and because I don’t want Science Officer Spock here to spend the next few decades just studying a train wreck while we poke the damn thing with a stick occasionally and do these ‘nudges’. Let’s roll out the Sagan Contact protocol. Or, should we just go full throttle with ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’? Whaddya say, McCoy?”
In other words, I am arguing that it is my duty, as a human, to go on record.
Does that explain why I should do this?
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Humans are really not so dissimilar compared to what’s probably out there. I had my moment in the desert where I was asked, ‘What do you want?‘, and the answer was ‘Global Peace’. To a certain extent, I wish I had your life. But then, I wouldn’t have my three kids, and I wouldn’t have had that moment where something said back to me, “Global Peace? That old chestnut? Seriously? Oh, you are serious. Okay, this is what you have to do...”
Let me go find out more about lie detectoring companies in London.
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