Alexei

• Alexei 17 Nov 2019 21:55 UTC

  2 points

  on: A mechanis­tic model of meditation

  Tan­gen­tially re­lated: https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​posts/​​RasFpce3fNZ8xp2T4/​​open-and-wel­come-thread-novem­ber-2019?com­men­tId=trSeGz­iLqLZ5jiAgv

• Alexei 17 Nov 2019 21:54 UTC

  2 points

  on: Open & Wel­come Thread—Novem­ber 2019

  I have read the en­tire “My big TOE” book/​tril­ogy by Thomas Camp­bell. If at least three peo­ple promise to read my sum­mary of it, I’ll write it up. Let me know how long you want the sum­mary to be.

  Su­per quick sum­mary of the book: Thomas Camp­bell seems like a de­cently smart guy; he has a PhD in physics and works for the gov­ern­ment. He claims his mind/​con­scious­ness can ex­ist in and travel be­tween mul­ti­ple re­al­ities. In this book he ex­plains his ver­sion of how the uni­verse works, how it got started, why it’s here, and why we are here.

  Per­son­ally, I found it mildly in­ter­est­ing. There are a lot of big claims, but it’s very hard to ver­ify them. Tom is pretty up­front about it: his goal is to lay out a con­cep­tual frame­work so that ev­ery­one can de­velop their own TOE (The­ory of Every­thing). He doesn’t ask the reader to trust him or his ver­sion. At the same time, if you can’t trust it… it’s kind of like read­ing sci-fi.

  I’m also happy to an­swer any ques­tions about the book /​ au­thor.

  What links here?

  • Alexei's comment on A mechanis­tic model of meditation by Kaj_Sotala (17 Nov 2019 21:55 UTC; 2 points)

• Alexei 17 Nov 2019 21:15 UTC

  5 points

  on: A mechanis­tic model of meditation

  Kaj, first off, huge thank you for writ­ing up all these posts on med­i­ta­tion. I don’t have time to read a lot of these books, but it’s good liter­a­ture, so it’s perfect to get the sum­mary from some­one I can trust.

  “In­tro­spec­tive aware­ness” sounds like the right ob­ject. Or, more speci­fi­cally, it definitely feels like it’s de­scribing my own ex­pe­rience. And my own, home­grown hy­poth­e­sis was some­thing like: con­scious­ness is like an echo or pic­ture-in-pic­ture. We can get glimpses of “our­selves” be­cause we can look at /​ load par­tial con­cepts of our­selves into the work­ing mem­ory.

  In­tro­spec­tive aware­ness is its own type of men­tal ob­ject...

  Wow, yes, yes, yes! My origi­nal fear with start­ing med­i­ta­tion was that it would re­move cer­tain ex­pe­riences from my life. It felt like I’d lose some­thing. And in the 7+ years I’ve done it, that just hasn’t hap­pened. And now I have the pre­cise lan­guage to de­scribe it. That is ex­actly what hap­pens for me: like, I can still see the suffer­ing and all that, but it’s like it’s wrapped in a bub­ble, which still al­lows me to see the emo­tion/​sen­sa­tion ex­actly like I would be­fore, but it loses the abil­ity to in­stantly prop­a­gate its agenda to the rest of my sys­tem.

  This kind of a pro­cess also teaches you to pay at­ten­tion to pat­terns of cause and effect in your mind.

  Yeah, I have seen this em­pha­sized in var­i­ous teach­ings, but I never ac­tu­ally prac­ticed it. Prob­a­bly some low hang­ing fruit here for me. I’ll try it out.

  “first you re­solve a lot of is­sues, but then you can get the abil­ity to push down the rest” dynamic

  One, I think the fore­most goal for any type of med­i­ta­tion should be to learn to see what is there. (Just like with ra­tio­nal­ity.) So there’s no push­ing or pul­ling or try­ing to change any­thing. And some­times with bad feel­ings or headaches, I’ve no­ticed that sim­ply pay­ing at­ten­tion to it (in­stead of flinch­ing away) re­solves it. It doesn’t make it “go away” or “block it”, it ac­tu­ally just un­ties the knot, so to speak.

  Two, I think there are two or­thog­o­nal skills that get buck­eted into “spiritual de­vel­op­ment.” One skill is in­sight (see MCTB for a good defi­ni­tion), but it’s ba­si­cally the abil­ity to see what’s go­ing on in your mind. And that skill will even­tu­ally take you to en­light­en­ment. The other skill is moral­ity. And while some prac­tices do em­pathize moral­ity prac­tice as well, I think in the clas­si­cal west­ern tra­di­tion (MCTB is a good ex­am­ple of this) we found paths to get to en­light­en­ment with­out all other “un­nec­es­sary” stuff… like moral­ity train­ing. So you end up with peo­ple who are tech­ni­cally en­light­ened, but it doesn’t au­to­mat­i­cally make them good hu­man be­ings. (I think this also re­solves the con­fu­sion in one of the re­cent SSC posts.)

• Alexei 15 Nov 2019 6:18 UTC

  2 points

  on: Genesis

  Use the power wisely. :)

• Alexei 11 Nov 2019 6:52 UTC

  7 points

  on: Indescribable

  I think some big life events fall into this cat­e­gory: be­ing mar­ried, hav­ing a kid, hav­ing a close loved one pass away, dy­ing your­self.

• Alexei 10 Nov 2019 16:16 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: lsusr's comment on: Open & Wel­come Thread—Novem­ber 2019

  Wel­come! Thank you for your posts!

• Alexei 10 Nov 2019 16:16 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: ryan_b's comment on: Open & Wel­come Thread—Novem­ber 2019

  In­ter­est­ing! I’ll take a look.

• Alexei 10 Nov 2019 16:14 UTC

  12 points

  on: Self-Keep­ing Secrets

  You kind of lost me at the end. Isn’t part of the ap­peal of magic tricks that even though they are easy to learn, they still take work to mas­ter, and even if you could do it, you don’t, but you DO en­joy watch­ing some­one else perform them?

  I think a re­lated, but some­what op­po­site ob­ser­va­tion is: we have more and more niches for ev­ery­one. For ex­am­ple, I of­ten run into peo­ple who watch TV shows, even TV shows that are similar to what I watch (scifi, fan­tasy), but we still have zero over­lap. That just couldn’t hap­pen even 10 years ago. It’s not that they can’t watch my shows, or I theirs. It’s just we don’t.

  Also this: https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​posts/​​XvN2QQpKTuEzgkZHY/​​be­ing-the-pareto-best-in-the-world

• Alexei 8 Nov 2019 23:47 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Alexei's comment on: The Zet­telkas­ten Method

  It just oc­curred to me that with math, but es­pe­cially with mu­sic the­ory, it’s hard to take notes in a digi­tal sys­tem (like Work­flowy), be­cause you can’t eas­ily draw sym­bols.

• Alexei 8 Nov 2019 23:43 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: ioannes_shade's comment on: The Zet­telkas­ten Method

  Just re­mem­bered to­day too.

  Over­all, I cre­ated about 30+ cards. (I think the num­ber if more a func­tion of how much time I spend learn­ing new things rather than any­thing else.) Mostly the cards are about statis­tics + math, but to­day I started cre­at­ing cards for mu­sic the­ory. I’m not as in love with the sys­tem as I thought I would be, but it definitely feels more like an ad­di­tion rather than a re­place­ment to my ex­ist­ing sys­tems. I’m cur­rently cre­at­ing cards for things I nor­mally wouldn’t write down. I think that’s a good thing.

  Mostly I’ve just been adding cards. I think I only looked through the cards twice. But right now I’m re­watch­ing some videos I watched ear­lier to­day, just so I can cre­ate the cards for the things I found use­ful, just so I can then go and ap­ply them to the piece of mu­sic I’m writ­ing. So, over­all, it definitely seems use­ful.

• Alexei 27 Oct 2019 4:33 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: alkjash's comment on: The Pit

  I am happy for you. :)

• Alexei 27 Oct 2019 1:48 UTC

  4 points

  on: The Pit

  Nice story. Do you feel like the boy, the el­ders, or the sci­en­tists?

• Alexei 19 Oct 2019 5:03 UTC

  6 points

  on: Im­ple­ment­ing an Idea-Man­age­ment System

  https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​posts/​​NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/​​the-zettelkas­ten-method-1

• Alexei 15 Oct 2019 22:08 UTC

  2 points

  on: ML is an in­effi­cient market

  Which tools are you talk­ing about?

• Alexei 9 Oct 2019 4:07 UTC

  5 points

  on: Reflec­tions on Premium Poker Tools: Part 1 - My journey

  Yeah, I’m not sure how big the mar­ket is for a poker soft­ware. There aren’t that many peo­ple play­ing poker and a vast ma­jor­ity of them play it ca­su­ally with no soft­ware. So even if you cap­ture the en­tire mar­ket, it still might be only 1000 peo­ple or so.

  As for peo­ple who say they are in­ter­ested but then flake, Se­bas­tian Mar­shall has the perfect word for them: jok­ers. Just ig­nore them im­me­di­ately and move on. If some­one wants to do busi­ness, you’ll feel it.

  I did a web startup too for a few years. And ev­ery­thing took me longer than ex­pected as well. In­clud­ing au­then­ti­ca­tion. It’s just a fact of life; but hope­fully we can plan bet­ter now.

• Alexei 5 Oct 2019 6:59 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Charlie Steiner's comment on: New Petrov Game Brainstorm

  I guess that seems to me to be within the spirit of the game.

• Alexei 5 Oct 2019 0:30 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Charlie Steiner's comment on: New Petrov Game Brainstorm

  What in­for­ma­tion would you share that would give you an ad­van­tage? (Keep in mind that play­ers are anony­mous. Though I guess any­one could in the­ory de-anonymize them­selves.)

New Petrov Game Brainstorm

• Alexei 3 Oct 2019 1:29 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: valentinslepukhin's comment on: Meet­ing the Dragon in Your Garage.

  No easy an­swers to these ques­tions. Wel­come to LessWrong where we try to figure it out. I’d recom­mend read­ing the Se­quences if you haven’t already.

• Alexei 2 Oct 2019 20:45 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: lionhearted's comment on: Honor­ing Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2019

  I’m con­fused why you got down­voted so much over a joke.… sorry.