does this change if you switch out consciousness for qualia? Eg studying the qualia of desire and it’s causes (tanha etc) and how to alleviate it
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the concept of qualia feels confused to me in the same way that consciousness does. i don't think you can know that anything in the universe experiences qualia except you so it doesn't make any sense to me to use whether *other things* experience qualia as a foundation for ethics
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that comes down to how you know anything, and epistemology. I don’t think you can know anything for sure, including that you’ve experienced anything in the past. Best you can do is find good explanations. It’s hard to explain why this current frame exists w/o disproving solipsism
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by the time you’re deciding to discount consciousness you’ve already implicitly decided to know tons of things, that’s way past just directly seeing this frame of experience. You had to use some sort of implicit epistemology to decide those things too, it’s not different in kind
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yeah fair. i am sort of deliberately overstating my real objection in an inflammatory way and at some point i should say something more precise but again, i am really unsure how to put it into words, something just feels really off to me about the way other people talk about this
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i often feel like people who talk about qualia are...shady. up to something. you ever get that sense?
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not the word i would use 😅 but sometimes it has a wireheading quality to it i feel weird about? i know this must be like the first objection they address but i still have it
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Only a fraction of people who talk about qualia are into wireheading.
If genuinely curious about the steelman, though, see:
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I'll also point out that even though that article is light-years ahead of the current discourse on wireheading, it's all still old news to us. Written in 2016, our views have advanced far beyond that kind of analysis.
A more formidable intellectual challenge would be to...
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...look into the more recent frameworks. E.g. non-linear wave computing, the solution to the boundary problem, etc.
I'd suggest reading this email exchange with Scott Alexander:
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this was a very helpful and interesting read, thanks andres! gives me some ideas for new directions to go in meditation. have you written or video'd more about the "secular climbing of the harmony gradient" you mention here?
Thank you Quiaochu! 😊
A great resource (and sort of unexpected phenomenological evidence of STV) would be Rob Burbea's writings about samadhi.
See:
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And if you are up for another deep dive, I'd recommend watching/reading about how neural annealing can help with trauma:
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