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Nick
@nickcammarata
safety research
🎈Joined March 2009

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It seems like possibly the main question when it comes to what reality is? And the alternative (copenhagen) is possibly even weirder. I think it’s a bad and false theory, but if I believed it I’d be obsessed with wtf is an observer, what’s the physics of observation
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I think what I’d expect is everyone who has even a bit of academic curiosity would invest a few hundred hours trying to understand the physical and epistemological arguments and deciding one way or another. But not caring seems bizarre. I think about it every few hours
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My spicy take for 0.1% of my followers is that meditation teachers should advertise 2nd path (happens to a lot of meditators, incredibly good) rather than enlightenment (nobody knows what it means exactly, not clearly beneficial)
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how many panic attacks have you had?
  • 0
    41.1%
  • 1-10
    44%
  • 11-100
    10.2%
  • > 100
    4.8%
1,553 votesFinal results
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Until we have better theories I think we should assume they’re unconscious. Though I think there’s a non-trivial chance we’re committing a moral atrocity by doing this
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Ofc it’s possible it’s already conscious, but if it is, it was an accident. Ideally we’re not leaving something so morally important up to unverifiable chance. We as a species should aim to help any qualia we create have well-being, or alternatively ensure it’s unconscious
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Alignment (which I work on) is complicated and there’s probably many solutions One answer (that I’m not working on rn) would be to make sure the model is Team Consciousness rather than Team Replicator, and giving it consciousness would probably help towards that goal
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and if 2 weren't true, prospects would be dim. New theories in physics come from extremes like the speed of light in a vacuum, or from black holes & particle colliders. Things like the jhanas & 5-MeO-DMT are our black holes and speed of light, and they're understudied
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if 1 weren't true, we wouldn't be able to talk in depth about how qualia works, about cessation or nirodha samapatti, about tanha and dukkha, the jhanas, or everyday emotions. Somehow the information has to go from those states to our lips. It's not epiphenomenal
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luckily I think a theory of qualia is tractable: 1. qualia is causally bidirectional: the universe sparks qualia and qualia can literally move the universe. The information flows both ways 2. there are many weird states of qualia, and extremes are where good science is done
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"i talk to the model and see how emotional it is and then decide if i think it has qualia" is not a good theory of qualia. It is certainly not a good way to determine if models should have moral welfare
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When people I know voluntarily blow up their lives (quit a job, end a relationship, move suddenly) it tends to go really well Humans inherently have status quo bias, meaning that if you're ready to take a big risk, you probably have good reason to
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Psychedelics gives everyone +10 interest in yoga and childhood psychology, -10 interest in whatever their friends think is prestigious, and +10 interest in either astrology or physics depending on personality
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I think there's a lot of potential for VR for meditation- particularly for intermediate meditators. By controlling visual and audio sense doors it can provide a laboratory for sensory experimentation. There's nothing magic about having your eyes closed that makes meditation work
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It’s probably not an area you want to innovate. It’s like innovating on rollercoaster by building your own when you’ve never ridden one before. Best to ride the standard ones before getting into rollercoaster-design
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All of this is also why I think it’s good to do the standard practices. Pretty much no matter what kind of spiritual practice you do, it’ll begin the transformation as you do it a lot, and you want a school of people get help from when that happens
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At this point, I'm pretty well convinced that rolling your own spiritual practice is like rolling your own cryptography -- yer gonna get hacked.
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Conversely, I think people who want to do it should probably be comfortable doing it more seriously during certain times in life. A think a lot of 18yos would get more out of 4yrs of meditation than 4yrs of partying and half-studying in college. A time where volatility is okay
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Or even just timing. Good to do it in times in life where you can handle disruption, and when you have a good support system. Probably not a good idea (in most cases) to start a serious meditation practice if you have a young kid for instance
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Also all of this is a perfectly good reason to not meditate, or not meditate for more than say 30m a day. In low doses it’s like exercise, probably just good. But in medium and higher doses it can do more than you bargain for. The wellness industry is too chill about it imo
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(The transformation metaphor is very lossy because nothing really transforms, and also the people who do it certainly aren’t better in any way, the way we may think a butterfly is better than a caterpillar. I just mean transformation as “change”)
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