We know that many zealous followers are willing to die for the honor of their leaders. It would not be very surprising to see that happen in early Christianity.
algekalipso
Karma: 129
For people who are planning on taking psychedelics (I’m not suggesting they do, but if they will anyway) or who have already done so: perhaps consider writing a high-quality trip report. They are super rare, and rationalist-informed trip reports might be excellent sources for research leads to figure out how the brain works.
For inspiration, perhaps read: Guide to Writing Rigorous Reports of Exotic States of Consciousness.
Also, I recommend reading “The Grand Illusion” by Steven Lehar for some excellent pointers for how psychedelic experiences can legitimately inform our understanding of consciousness. Here is a writeup I made about his life’s work and how it was informed by his (very rare) rational psychonautics.
For another example of rational synthesis of psychedelic phenomenology see: The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (@Harvard Science of Psychedelics Club) or this talk about mapping high-energy states of consciousness delivered at a ACX online meetup.
Finally, consider submitting a datapoint for the Tracer Tool. More info here.
Cheers!
This is substantiated by data in “Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain” (quote):
Birth of children
I have heard a number of mothers and father say that having kids was the best thing that ever happened to them. The survey showed this was a very strong pattern, especially among women. In particular, a lot of the reports deal with the very moment in which they held their first baby in their arms for the first time. Some quotes to illustrate this pattern:
The best experience of my life was when my first child was born. I was unsure how I would feel or what to expect, but the moment I first heard her cry I fell in love with her instantly. I felt like suddenly there was another person in this world that I cared about and loved more than myself. I felt a sudden urge to protect her from all the bad in the world. When I first saw her face it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It is almost an indescribable feeling. I felt like I understood the purpose and meaning of life at that moment. I didn’t know it was possible to feel the way I felt when I saw her. I was the happiest I have ever been in my entire life. That moment is something that I will cherish forever. The only other time I have ever felt that way was with the subsequent births of my other two children. It was almost a euphoric feeling. It was an intense calm and contentment.
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I was young and had a difficult pregnancy with my first born. I was scared because they had to do an emergency c-section because her health and mine were at risk. I had anticipated and thought about how the moment would be when I finally got to hold my first child and realize that I was a mother. It was unbelievably emotional and I don’t think anything in the world could top the amount of pleasure and joy I had when I got to see and hold her for the first time.
—————
I was 29 when my son was born. It was amazing. I never thought I would be a father. Watching him come into the world was easily the best day of my life. I did not realize that I could love someone or something so much. It was at about 3am in the morning so I was really tired. But it was wonderful nonetheless.
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I absolutely loved when my child was born. It was a wave of emotions that I haven’t felt by anything before. It was exciting and scary and beautiful all in one.No luck for anti-natalists… the super-strong drug-like effects of having children will presumably continue to motivate most humans to reproduce no matter how strong the ethical case against doing so may be. Coming soon: a drug that makes you feel like “you just had 10,000 children”.
If you lack an objective, a good goal is to be able to solve national math Olympiad problems in the time allowed for the competitions.
The histogram of CSHW amplitudes seems to have very little information content, while the entire matrix of just-noticeable-differences of our experience seems to have a whole lot of information. If CSHWs are so important to determine a “brain state”, where is all the missing information?
Two points here. First, according to the theory -as Mike points out- the overall “mood” of the state is largely encoded in the low frequency harmonics, while the higher frequency ones are more important for semantic information. In a sense, you can think of the lower frequency harmonics as creating a set of buckets in which to put, juggle, and recombine the information provided by the higher frequency harmonics. Hence, while the specific information content of the experience might require a very fine level of resolution, both the valence and the broad information-processing steps might not. And second, there is more to the CSHWs than just the histogram of amplitudes. There is also a matrix of phase-locking relations between them, which increases the overall information content by a large amount.
I suspect half speed is actually a rational decision given some underlying model AnnaSalamon was not aware of explicitly.
For instance, she may intuitively feel that she just passed the hotel. If so, then being extra careful to look well for features and marks around you that could give you hints of whether this happened could work best at half speed. Are there fewer hotels around? Is it a residential area? Does the amount of economic activity seems to be increasing or decreasing as I move in this direction? Then, you can turn around and get there faster.
Formalizing the precise model that would make half-speed the rational choice may be a bit complicated. But that’s what the Bayesian approach to cognitive sciences would try to do first.
The average time people take to complete the survey is 20 minutes, with most people taking 15 and a long tail of people taking up to several hours, presumably because they went on to do something else for a while and returned to complete it later.
Thanks for mentioning the problem with the links. Fixed.
It might not provide a lot of knowledge to the subject who practices mysticism. It does provide the best experience in his or her life.
For the time being, this might not provide a lot of value in the grand scheme of things. However, as we advance into posthumanisty, we do want to explore the state-space of possible conscious experiences in a systematic way so we can design ourselves in such a way that we inhabit the best regions of conscious experience. Mysticistical practice, therefore, has a tremendous long term potentintial; having practicioners and scientists interested is crucial if we are indeed to find out more about these states of consciousness.
I think, after all, there is a very pertinent parallel in the community of lesswrong: it is called fun theory. The fact that mystical experiences can be so outsandingly great and sublime beyond words is a very strong indicator that we will never run out of fun.
Definitely. I’ll probably be quoting some of your text in articles on Qualia Computing soon, in order to broaden the bridge between LessWrong-consumable media and consciousness research.
Of all the articles linked, perhaps the best place to start would be the Pseudo-time Arrow. Very curious to hear your thoughts about it.
Did you know that we already have instances of things that pass the Turing test?
And more surprisingly, that we don’t generally consider them conscious?
And the most amazing of all: That they have existed for probably at the very least a hundred thousand years (but possibly much more)?
I am talking about the characters in our dreams
They fool us into thinking that they are conscious! That they are the subjects of their own worlds just as people presumably are when awake.
You can have a very eloquent conversation with a dream character without ever noticing there is any apparent lack of consciousness. You can even ask them about their own consciousness (I have done so).
The riddle to why this is possible involves a very deep state of affairs that we are scarcely aware of in daily life. Namely, that your phenomenal self is, just as well, a dream character.
I think you are not aware of research in acquired taste. It turns out that the effect of particular foods and drinks on psychological states create some deep subconscious associations. Take this as a clear and striking example:
“A study that investigated the effect of adding caffeine and theobromine (active compounds in chocolate) vs. a placebo to identically-flavored drinks that participants tasted several times, yielded the development of a strong preference for the drink with the compounds.[3]”
I think that’s why I do enjoy beer now, even though I thought exactly as you did several years ago. I thought it was a huge collective rationalization. Which I still think is a big part of it, specially among teenagers and young adults who like to boast about being strong drinkers and how oh-dear they love alcohol so very much. But grown up people do drink, say, one beer alone and seem to enjoy it quite a bit. But without the pleasant relaxation that usually follows, though, the taste would not be agreeable. So we see a deep neurological change in the way we process taste.
I may not risk to claim: There are no human inequalities, there are only sentient inequalities.
I’d mention that Steven Lehar foreshadowed the paradigm in his Directional Harmonic Theory of neurocomputation. I recommend reading his book “The Grand Illusion” for abundant phenomenological data in favor of this flavor of neurocomputation.
Both you and prase seem to be missing the point. The experience of green has nothing to with wavelengths of light. Wavelengths of light are completely incidental to the experience. Why? Because you can experience the qualia of green thanks to synesthesia. Likewise, if you take LSD at a sufficient dose, you will experience a lot of colors that are unrelated to the particular input your senses are receiving. Finally, you can also experience such color in a dream. I did that last night.
The experience of green is not the result of information-processing that works to discriminate between wavelengths of light. Instead, the experience of green was recruited by natural selection to be part of an information-processing system that discriminates between wavelengths of light. If it had been more convenient, less energetically costly, more easily accessible in the neighborhood of exploration, etc. evolution would have recruited entirely different qualia in order to achieve the exact same information-processing tasks color currently takes part in.
In other words, stating what stimuli triggers the phenomenology is not going to help at all in elucidating the very nature of color qualia. For all we know, other people may experience feelings of heat and cold instead of colors (locally bounded to objects in their 2.5D visual field), and still behave reasonably well as judged by outside observers.
Thanks for your feedback. I am aiming to have the writeup done by August 8th. You will be able to find it in Qualia Computing.
Announcement:
Enough people are continuing to answer the questionnaire that it makes sense to extend the deadline until midnight (California time) of the Sunday 2nd of August of 2015.
Thanks for helping! I am aiming to have the writeup with the results ready by August 8th.
doing mind-coalescing and decolescing
That is not enough to solve the problem of other minds, as the article explains. The main problem is that when you incorcoporate a whole brain into your overall brain-mass by connecting to it, you can’t be certain whether the other being was conscious to begin with or whether the effect is a simple result of your massively amplified brain.
That’s why you need a scheme that allows the other being to solve a puzzle while you are disconnected. The puzzle needs to be such that only a conscious intelligence could solve it. And to actually verify that the entity solved it on its own you need to connect again to it and verify while merged that the solution is found there.
Of course you need to make sure that you distract yourself while you are temporarily disconnected, otherwise you may suspect you accidentally solved the phenomenal puzzle on your own.
The solution has a minimum of complexity, and to my knowledge no one else had proposed it before. Derek Parfit, Daniel Kolak, Borges and David Pearce get into some amazing territories that could well lead to a solution of this sort. But they always stay one step short of getting something where the creation of information is a demonstration of another entity actually being conscious.
I personally would rather live a good life into my prime and be humanely >slaughtered and fed to some higher life form, than never exist at all. For the most part, the >animals I eat would not have ever existed had the demand for meat not existed as well.
It seems to me that when you say ‘never exist at all’ you are bringing a mystic notion of identity into conscious experience. A lot has been written about personal identity and the like, and I would argue that the notion of one’s identity tied to genetic makeup or historical origin is not the most relevant way of approaching the matter. In this way, when you say “I’d prefer to have existed in any case” I ask “point to me who existed”. When you reference the life-path of the animal in question I would point out that you are showing me a collection of conscious experiences. What, if any, distinguish these experiences in a fundamental way from other experiences alike but originated in other similar animals? I don’t think anything of real relevance.
The idea that somehow whenever you add another animal into the equation you are multiplying the number of entities brought into existence is questionable. It does have moral consequences, however. For instance, if multiplying entities was a real possibility, such that giving birth to animals brought into existence new ‘beings’, it could be argued that it is preferable to bring two animals to the world, each living 25 years, than bringing only one that lives 50. Assuming that each conscious moment is qualitatively similar in this animals, if you don’t believe in the multiplicity of entities, the two scenarios are completely equivalent.
I think that the confusion I point is very prevalent in animal welfare talk, and I think it contaminates rationality for that matter. I have heard people who put a lot of value in the multiplication of entities argue that massive factory farming is desirable precisely for this reason. They reason that, precisely because you are bringing more ‘distinct’ life into being, even if in deplorable sates, chicken farms are doing something good. If you look at it from a reductionist perspective, you are merely making little brains play again and again the same old plot with slight variations. And the worst is that the plot is actually painful.
Really great post!
Andrés (Qualia Computing) here. Let me briefly connect your article with some work that QRI has done.
First, we take seriously the view of a “moment of experience” and study the contents of such entities. In Empty Individualism, every observer is a “moment of experience” and there is no continuity from one moment to the next; the illusion is caused by the recursive and referential way the content of experience is constructed in brains. We also certainly agree that you can be aware of something without being aware of being aware of it. As we I will get to, this is an essential ingredient in the way subjective time is constructed
The concept of blending is related to our concept of “The Tyranny of the Intentional Object”. Indeed, some people are far more prone to confusing logical or emotional thoughts for revealed truth; introspective ability (which can be explained as the rate at which awareness of a having being aware before happens) varies between people and is trainable to an extent. People who are systematizers can develop logical ontologies of the world that feel inherently true, just as empathizers can experience a made-up world of interpersonal references as revealed true. You could describe this difference in terms of whether blending is happening more frequently with logical or emotional structures. But empathizers and systematizers (and people high on both traits!) can, in addition, be highly introspective, meaning that they recognize those sensations as aspects of their own mind.
The fact that each moment of experience can incorporate informational traces of previous ones allows the brain to construct moments of experience with all kinds of interesting structures. Of particular note is what happens when you take a psychedelic drug. The “rate of qualia decay” lowers due to a generalization of what in visual phenomenology is called “tracers”. The disruption of inhibitory control signals from the cortex leads to the cyclical activation of the thalamus* and thus the “re-living” of previous contents of experience in high-frequency repeating patterns (see “tracers” section of this article). On psychedelics, each moment of experience is “bigger”. You can formalize this by representing each moment of experience as a connected network, where each node is a quale and each edge is a local binding relationship of some sort (whether one is blending or not, may depend on the local topology of the network). In the structure of the network you can encode the information pertaining to many constructed subagents; phenomenal objects that feel like “distinct objects/realities/channels” would be explained in terms of clusters of nodes in the network (e.g. subsets of nodes such that the clustering coefficient within them is much larger than the average clustering coefficient of different subsets of nodes of similar size). As an aside, dissociatives, in particular, drastically change the size of clusters, which phenomenally is experienced as “being aware of more than one reality at once”.
You can encode time-structure into the network by looking at the implicit causality of the network, which gives rise to what we call a pseudo-time arrow. This model can account for all of the bizarre and seemingly unphysical experiences of time people report on psychedelics. As the linked article explains in detail, how e.g. thought-loops, moments of eternity, and time branching can be expressed in the network, and emerge recursively from calls to previous clusters of sensations (as information traces).
Even more strange, perhaps, is the fact that a long rate of qualia decay can give rise to unusual geometry. In particular, if you saturate the recursive calls and bind together a network with a very high branching factor, you get a hyperbolic space (cf. The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes).
That said, perhaps the most important aspect of the investigation has been to encounter a deep connection between felt sense of wellbeing (i.e. “emotional valence”) and the structure of the network. From your article:
The claim we would make is that the very way in which this packaging happens gives rise to pleasant or unpleasant mental objects, and this is determined by the structure (rather than “semantic content”) of the experience. Evolution made it such that thoughts that refer to things that are good for the inclusive fitness of our genes get packaged in more symmetrical harmonious ways.
The above is, however, just a partial explanation. In order to grasp the valence effects of meditation and psychedelics, however, it will be important to take into account a number of additional paradigms of neuroscience. I recommend Mike Johnson’s articles: A Future for Neuroscience and The Neuroscience of Meditation. The topic is too broad and complex for me to cover here right now, but I would advance the claim that (1) when you “harmonize” the introspective calls of previously-experienced qualia you up the valence, and (2) the process can lead to “annealing” where the internal structure of the moments of experience are highly-symmetrical, and for reasons we currently don’t understand, this appears to co-occur in a 1-1 fashion with high valence.
I look forward to seeing more of your thoughts on meditation (and hopefully psychedelics, too, if you have personal experience with them).
*The specific brain regions mentioned is a likely mechanism of action but may turn out to be wrong upon learning further empirical facts. The general algorithmic structure of psychedelic effects, though, where every sensation “feels like it lasts longer” will have the downstream implications on the construction of the structure of moments experience either way.