zhukeepa(Alex Zhu)

• zhukeepa 29 Aug 2024 1:20 UTC

  10 points

  0

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Sec­u­lar in­ter­pre­ta­tions of core peren­ni­al­ist claims

  I think I assign close to zero probability to the first hypothesis. Brains are not that fast at thinking, and while sometimes your system 1 can make snap judgements, brains don’t reevaluate huge piles of evidence in milliseconds. These kinds of things take time, and that means if you are dying, you will die before you get to finish your life review.

  My guess is that our main crux lies somewhere around here. If I’d thought the life review experience involved tons and tons of “thinking”, or otherwise some form of active cognitive processing, I would also give ~zero probability to the first hypothesis.

  However, my understanding of the life review experience is that it’s the phenomenological correlate of stopping a bunch of the active cognitive processing we employ to dissociate. In order to “unsee” something (i.e., dissociate from it), you still have to see it enough to recognize that it’s something you’re supposed to unsee, and then perform the actual work of “unseeing”. What I’m proposing is that all the work that goes into “unseeing” halts during a life review, and all the stuff that would originally have gotten seen-enough-to-get-unseen now just gets seen directly, experienced in a decentralized and massively parallel fashion.

  This is related to the hypothesis I’d mentioned in the original post about attention being a filter, rather than a spotlight. On this view, we filter stuff out to help us survive, but this filtration process actually takes more energy than directly experiencing everything unfiltered. This would counterintuitively imply that having high precision on (/​ paying attention to) a bajillion things at once might actually require less cognitive effort than our default moment-to-moment experience, and the reason this doesn’t happen by default is because we can’t navigate reality well enough to survive in this lower-cognitive-effort state.

  I think we’d still need an explanation for how the memo to stop dissociating could propagate throughout one’s whole belief network so quickly. But I can pretty easily imagine non-mysterious explanations for this, e.g. something analogous to a mother’s belief network near-instantaneously getting the memo to put ~100% of their psychological and physiological effort into lifting a car off of their child. The Experience of Dying From Falls by Noyes and Kletti (sci-hub link here) describes somewhat similar experiences occurring during falls on the top of page 4.

  I should also mention that on my current models, just because someone experiences a dump of all their undissociated experiences doesn’t mean that they’ll remember any of it, or that any more than a tiny minority of these undissociated experiences will have a meaningful impact on how they’ll live their lives afterward. I think it can be a lot like having a “life-changing peak experience” at a workshop and then life continuing as usual upon return.

• zhukeepa 27 Aug 2024 23:00 UTC

  6 points

  2

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Sec­u­lar in­ter­pre­ta­tions of core peren­ni­al­ist claims

  I’m curious for your models for why people might experience these kinds of states.

  One crucial aspect of my model is that these kinds of states get experienced when the psychological defense mechanisms that keep us dissociated get disarmed. If Alice and Bob are married, and Bob is having an affair with Carol, it’s very common for Alice to filter out all the evidence that Bob is having an affair. When Alice finally confronts the reality of Bob’s affair, the psychological motive for filtering out the evidence that Bob is having an affair gets rendered obsolete, and Alice comes to recognize the signs she’d been ignoring all along.

  I’m pretty much proposing an analogous mechanism, except with the full confrontation of our mortality instead, and the recognition of what we’d been filtering out happening in a split second. (It’s different but related with ayahuasca, which is famous for its ability to penetrate psychological defense mechanisms, whether we like it or not.)

• zhukeepa 27 Aug 2024 22:28 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: zhukeepa’s comment on: Sec­u­lar in­ter­pre­ta­tions of core peren­ni­al­ist claims

  @habryka, responding to your agreement with this claim:

  a majority of the anecdata about reviewing the details of one’s life from a broader vantage point are just culturally-mediated hallucinations, like alien abductions.

  I think my real crux is that I’ve had experiences adjacent to near-death experiences on ayahuasca, during which I’ve directly experienced some aspects of phenomena reported in life reviews (like re-experiencing memories in relatively high-res from a place where my usual psychological defenses weren’t around to help me dissociate, especially around empathizing with others’ experiences), which significantly increases my credence on there being something going on in these life review accounts beyond just culturally-mediated hallucinations.

  Abduction by literal physical aliens is obviously a culturally-mediated hallucination, but I suspect the general experience of “alien abductions” is an instantiation of an unexplained psychological phenomenon that’s been reported throughout the ages. I don’t feel comfortable dismissing this general psychological phenomenon as 100% chaff, given that I’ve had comparably strange experiences of “receiving teachings from a plant spirit” that nevertheless seem explainable within the scientific worldview.

  In general, I think we have significantly different priors about the extent to which the things you dismiss as confabulations actually contain veridical content of a type signature that’s still relatively foreign to the mainstream scientific worldview, in addition to chaff that’s appropriate to dismiss. I’ll concede that you’re much better than I am at rejecting false positives, but I think my “epistemic risk-neutrality” makes me much better than you are at rejecting false negatives. 🙂

• zhukeepa 27 Aug 2024 4:05 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: jweber’s comment on: Sec­u­lar in­ter­pre­ta­tions of core peren­ni­al­ist claims

  Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts! A couple of thoughts in response:

  I suspect that the principles you describe around the “experience of tanha” go well beyond human or even mammalian psychology.

  That’s how I see it too. Buddhism says tanha is experienced by all non-enlightened beings, which probably includes some unicellular organisms. If I recall correctly, some active inference folk I’ve brainstormed with consider tanha a component of any self-evidencing process with counterfactual depth.

  Forgiveness (non-judgment?) may then need a clear definition: are you talking about a person’s ability not to seek “tanha-originating revenge,” while still being able to act out of caring self-protection?

  Yes, this pretty much aligns exactly with how I think about forgiveness!

• zhukeepa 27 Aug 2024 3:40 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: jmh’s comment on: Sec­u­lar in­ter­pre­ta­tions of core peren­ni­al­ist claims

  I really like the directions that both of you are thinking in.

  But I think the “We suffered and we forgive, why can’t you?” is not the way to present the idea.

  I agree. I think of it more as like “We suffered and we forgave and found inner peace in doing so, and you can too, as unthinkable as that may seem to you”.

  I think the turbo-charged version is “We suffered and we forgave, and we were ultimately grateful for the opportunity to do so, because it just so deeply nourishes our souls to know that we can inspire hope and inner peace in others going through what we had to go through.” I think Jesus alludes to this in the Sermon on the Mount:

  11 “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. 12 Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

• zhukeepa 27 Aug 2024 3:23 UTC

  6 points

  2

  in reply to: zhukeepa’s comment on: Sec­u­lar in­ter­pre­ta­tions of core peren­ni­al­ist claims

  Here’s something possibly relevant I wrote in a draft of this post that I ended up cutting out, because people seemed to keep getting confused about what I was trying to say. I’m including this in the hopes that it will clarify rather than further confuse, but I will warn in advance that the latter may happen instead...

  The Goodness of Reality hypothesis is closely related to the Buddhist claim of non-self, which says that any fixed and unchanging sense of self we identify with is illusory; I partially interpret “illusory” to mean “causally downstream of a trapped prior”. One corollary of non-self is that it’s erroneous for us to model ourselves as a discrete entity with fixed and unchanging terminal values, because this entity would be a fixed and unchanging self. This means that anyone employing reasoning of the form “well, it makes sense for me to feel tanha toward X, because my terminal values imply that X is bad!” is basing their reasoning on the faulty premise that they actually have terminal values in the first place, as opposed to active blind spots masquerading as terminal values.

• zhukeepa 27 Aug 2024 3:22 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Sec­u­lar in­ter­pre­ta­tions of core peren­ni­al­ist claims

  Your section on “tanha” sounds roughly like projecting value into the world, and then mentally latching on to an attractive high-value fabricated option.

  I would say that the core issue has more to do with the mental latching (or at least a particular flavor of it, which is what I’m claiming tanha refers to) than with projecting value into the world. I’m basically saying that any endorsed mental latching is downstream of an active blind spot, regardless of whether it’s making the error of projecting value into the world.

  I think this probably brings us back to:

  A big problem with this post is that I don’t have a clear idea of “tanha” is/​isn’t, so can’t really tell how broad various claims are.

  A couple of additional pointers that might be helpful:

  • I think of tanha as corresponding to the phenomenology of resisting an update because of a trapped prior.

  • I think tanha is present whenever we get triggered, under the standard usage of the word (like in “trigger warning”), and I think of milder forms of tanha as being kind of like micro-triggers.

  • Whenever we’re suffering, and there’s a sense of rush and urgency coming from lower subsystems that override higher cognition in service of trying to make the suffering go away, there’s tanha involved.

  (Note that I don’t consider myself an expert on Buddhism, so take these pointers with a grain of salt.)

  I think it might be helpful if you elaborated on specific confusions you have around the concept of tanha.

• zhukeepa 26 Aug 2024 16:43 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Sec­u­lar in­ter­pre­ta­tions of core peren­ni­al­ist claims

  I’m open to the hypothesis that the life review is basically not a real empirical phenomenon, although I don’t currently find that very plausible. I do think it’s probably true that a lot of the detailed characteristics ascribed to life reviews are not nearly as universal as some near-death experience researchers claim they are, but it seems pretty implausible to me that a majority of the anecdata about reviewing the details of one’s life from a broader vantage point are just culturally-mediated hallucinations, like alien abductions. (That’s what I’m understanding you to be claiming, please let me know if I’m wrong.)

  For example, the anecdatapoint in the link I’d shared about the guy who had a near-death experience during a fall included a life review. (“Then I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief character in the performance. Everything was transfigured as though by a heavenly light and everything was beautiful without grief, without anxiety, and without pain. The memory of very tragic experiences I had had was clear but not saddening.”) This fall happened in 1871, before life reviews were prevalent in popular culture, and I’m curious how you interpret anecdatapoints like these.

• zhukeepa 26 Aug 2024 6:36 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: quiet_NaN’s comment on: How I started be­liev­ing re­li­gion might ac­tu­ally mat­ter for ra­tio­nal­ity and moral philosophy

  Regarding your second point, I’m leaving this comment as a placeholder to indicate my intention to give a proper response at some point. My views here have some subtlely that I want to make sure I unpack correctly, and it’s getting late here!

• zhukeepa 26 Aug 2024 6:25 UTC

  2 points

  4

  in reply to: quiet_NaN’s comment on: How I started be­liev­ing re­li­gion might ac­tu­ally mat­ter for ra­tio­nal­ity and moral philosophy

  In response to your third point, I want to echo ABlue’s comment about the compatibility of the trapped prior view and the evopsych view. I also want to emphasize that my usage of “trapped prior” includes genetically pre-specified priors, like a fear of snakes, which I think can be overriden.

  In any case, I don’t see why priors that predispose us to e.g. adultery couldn’t be similarly overriden. I wonder if our main source of disagreement has to do with the feasibility of overriding “hard-wired” evolutionary priors?

• zhukeepa 26 Aug 2024 5:45 UTC

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: quiet_NaN’s comment on: How I started be­liev­ing re­li­gion might ac­tu­ally mat­ter for ra­tio­nal­ity and moral philosophy

  In response to your first point, I think of moral codes as being contextual more than I think of them as being subjective, but I do think of them as fundamentally being about pragmatism (“let’s all agree to coordinate in ABC way to solve PQR problem in XYZ environment, and socially punish people who aren’t willing to do so”). I also think religions often make the mistake of generalizing moral codes beyond the contexts in which they arose as helpful adaptations.

  I think of decision theory as being the basis for morality—see e.g. Critch’s take here and Richard Ngo’s take here. I evaluate how ethical people are based on how good they are at paying causal costs for larger acausal gains.

• zhukeepa 26 Aug 2024 5:39 UTC

  11 points

  0

  in reply to: ABlue’s comment on: Sec­u­lar in­ter­pre­ta­tions of core peren­ni­al­ist claims

  I do draw a distinction between value and ethics. Although my current best guess is that decision theory does in some sense reduce ethics to a subset of value, I do think it’s a subset worth distinguishing. For example, I still have a concept of evaluating how ethical someone is, based on how good they are at paying causal costs for larger acausal gains.

  I think the Goodness of Reality principle is maybe a bit confusingly named, because it’s not really a claim about the existence of some objective notion of Good that applies to reality per se, and is instead a claim about how our opinions about reality are fundamentally distorted by false conceptions of who we are. I think metaethics crucially relies on us not being confused about who we are, which is how I see the two relating.

Sec­u­lar in­ter­pre­ta­tions of core peren­ni­al­ist claims

• zhukeepa 23 Aug 2024 22:00 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: How I started be­liev­ing re­li­gion might ac­tu­ally mat­ter for ra­tio­nal­ity and moral philosophy

  Thanks a lot for sharing your experience! I would be very curious for you to further elaborate on this part:

  Eventually this led to some moments of insight when I realized just how trapped by my own ontology I had become, and then found a way threw to a new way of seeing the world. These happened almost instantly, like a dam breaking and releasing all the realizations that had been held back.

• zhukeepa 23 Aug 2024 21:59 UTC

  11 points

  5

  in reply to: ABlue’s comment on: How I started be­liev­ing re­li­gion might ac­tu­ally mat­ter for ra­tio­nal­ity and moral philosophy

  But in order for that to be plausible, you would need a reason why the almost-truths they found are so goddamn antimemetic that the most studied and followed people in history weren’t able to make them stick.

  A few thoughts:

  1. I think many of the truths do stick (like “it’s never too late to repent for your misdeeds”), but end up getting wrapped up in a bunch of garbage.

  2. The geeks, mops, and sociopaths model feels very relevant, with the great spiritual leaders /​ people who were serious about doing inner work being the geeks.

  3. In some sense, these truths are fundamentally about beating Moloch, and so long as Moloch is in power, Moloch will naturally find ways to subvert them.

  They’re so slippery that until you’ve gotten past one yourself it’s hard to believe they exist (especially when the phenomenal experience of knowing-something-that-was-once-utterly-unknowable can also seemingly be explained by developing a delusion).

  YES. I think this is extraordinarily well-articulated.

• zhukeepa 23 Aug 2024 21:44 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Adam Shai’s comment on: Ex­tended In­ter­view with Zhu­keepa on Religion

  There are important insights and claims from religious sources that seem to capture psychological and social truths that aren’t yet fully captured by science. At least some of these phenomenon might be formalizable via a better understanding of how the brain and the mind work, and to that end predictive processing (and other theories of that sort) could be useful to explain the phenomenon in question.

  Yes, I agree with this claim.

  You spoke of wanting formalization but I wonder if the main thing is really the creation of a science, though of course math is a very useful tool to do science with and to create a more complete understanding. At the end of the day we want our formalizations to comport to reality—whatever aspects of reality we are interested in understanding.

  That feels resonant. I think the kind of science I’m hoping for is currently bottlenecked by us not yet having the right formalisms, kind of like how Newtonian physics was bottlenecked by not having the formalism of calculus. (I would certainly want to build things using these formalisms, like an ungameable steel-Arbital.)

• zhukeepa 23 Aug 2024 21:33 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: How I started be­liev­ing re­li­gion might ac­tu­ally mat­ter for ra­tio­nal­ity and moral philosophy

  I’m not sure what you mean by that, but the claim “many interpretations of religious mystical traditions converge because they exploit the same human cognitive flaws” seems plausible to me. I mostly don’t find such interpretations interesting, and don’t think I’m interpreting religious mystical traditions in such a way.

How I started be­liev­ing re­li­gion might ac­tu­ally mat­ter for ra­tio­nal­ity and moral philosophy

• zhukeepa 23 Aug 2024 15:56 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: Ex­tended In­ter­view with Zhu­keepa on Religion

  If I change “i.e. the pluralist focus Alex mentions” to “e.g. the pluralist focus Alex mentions” does that work? I shouldn’t have implied that all people who believe in heuristics recommended by many religions are pluralists (in your sense). But it does seem reasonable to say that pluralists (in your sense) believe in heuristics recommended by many religions, unless I’m misunderstanding you. (In the examples you listed these would be heuristics like “seek spiritual truth”, “believe in (some version of) God”, “learn from great healers”, etc.)

  If your main point is “don’t follow religious heuristics blindly, only follow them if you actually understand why they’re good” I’m totally with you. I think I got thrown off a bit because, AFAIU, the way people tend to come to adopt pluralist views is by doing exactly that, and thereby coming to conclusions that go against mainstream religious interpretations. (I am super impressed that the Pope himself seems to have been going in this direction. The Catholic monks at the monastery I visited generally wished the Pope were a lot more conservative.)

  I personally don’t have a great way of distinguishing between “trying to reach these people” and “trying to manipulate these people”.

  I use heuristics similar to those for communicating to young children.

  In general I don’t even think most people trying to do such outreach genuinely know whether their actual motivations are more about outreach or about manipulation. (E.g. I expect that most people who advocate for luxury beliefs sincerely believe that they’re trying to help worse-off people understand the truth.) Because of this I’m skeptical of elite projects that have outreach as a major motivation, except when it comes to very clearly scientifically-grounded stuff.

  This is why I mostly want religious pluralist leaders who already have an established track record of trustworthiness in their religious communities to be in charge of getting the message across to the people of their religion.

• zhukeepa 22 Aug 2024 18:39 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: Ex­tended In­ter­view with Zhu­keepa on Religion

  So my overall position here is something like: we should use religions as a source of possible deep insights about human psychology and culture, to a greater extent than LessWrong historically has (and I’m grateful to Alex for highlighting this, especially given the social cost of doing so).

  
  Thanks a lot for the kind words!

  IMO this all remains true even if we focus on the heuristics recommended by many religions, i.e. the pluralistic focus Alex mentions.

  I think we’re interpreting “pluralism” differently. Here are some central illustrations of what I consider to be the pluralist perspective:

  • the Catholic priest I met at the Parliament of World Religions who encouraged someone who had really bad experiences with Christianity to find spiritual truth in Hinduism

  • the passage in the Quran that says the true believers of Judaism and Christianity will also be saved

  • the Vatican calling the Buddha and Jesus great healers

  I don’t think “lots of religions recommend X” means the pluralist perspective thinks X is good. If anything, the pluralist perspective is actually pretty uncommon /​ unusual among religions, especially these days.

  Because if you understand the insights that Christianity is built upon, you can use those to reach people without the language of Christianity itself. And if you don’t understand those insights, then you don’t know how to avoid incorporating the toxic parts of Christianity.

  I think this doesn’t work for people with IQ ⇐ 100, which is about half the world. I agree that an understanding of these insights is necessary to avoid incorporating the toxic parts of Christianity, but I think this can be done even using the language of Christianity. (There’s a lot of latitude in how one can interpret the Bible!)