This definitely helps clarify, thank you very much. I suspect it will take me some time to fully understand your ideas, but my current best stab at a (probably overcompressed) summary would be:
Our usual state of mind consists of experiencing a profusion of thoughts and inner sensations. These thoughts interact with each other, and generate further thoughts. We may experience a causal connection between thoughts, leading to the experience of “trains of thought”. This experience of causal connection may or may not accurately reflect the causal process giving rise to the thoughts. Individual thoughts or trains of thought compete for attention. It is this welter of activity that is Noise.
The absence of Noise is experienced as an inner silence, the Void. This differs from what we experience after suppressing Noise: it’s the difference between throwing a blanket over a loud radio, and switching the radio off. Being (as contrasted with doing) ultimately resides in the Void.
Thoughts may arise from the Void. These will be experienced as without cause. For example, choices or desires arising from the Void feel uncaused, resulting in the experience of free will. This contrasts with goals, which are experienced as both caused by thoughts, and causing thoughts: they are an integral part of Noise.
By starting from the Void, we decrease the extent to which our thoughts arise from spurious interactions due to Noise, and instead flow directly from our being. This allows our thoughts and our doing to serve our being. Goals then cease to define or control us, and instead are tools to be dropped once they cease to be useful.
Hopefully I’m not totally misunderstanding you here.
Starting your introduction with
seems likely to turn away roughly 40% of the US population, along with any leaders who need the goodwill of that 40% to keep their positions.
The point I understand you to be making (tripling the brain size of a chimp gives more than triple the impact) could be easily made without this sentence to introduce it. Given the importance of the US in addressing the existential threat of AI, and assuming one of the goals of this article is to be a general call to action, potentially alienating nearly half the target audience seems counterproductive.