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Chipmonk
Karma: 759
This all seems very teleological. Do you have thoughts on what the teleology of the universe could be under this model?
Thanks for asking. This is the intention of Mathematical Boundaries Workshop which is running now. Let me know if you’d like to come on Sunday
Boundaries Update #1
New better link: https://www.aria.org.uk/programme-safeguarded-ai/
yea
right, yeah, i think precisely formalizing boundaries is less useful for the cyborgism angle
Personal anecdote:
Ever since reading George’s post, I’ve been noticing ways in which I have been (subconsciously) tensing muscles in my neck—and possibly around my vagus nerve and inside my head. I wonder if by tensing these muscles, I’m reducing blood flow.
(I can think of reasons why someone might learn to do this on purpose actually, eg in response to some social stress.)
So now I’m experimenting with relaxing those muscles whenever I notice myself tensing them. Maybe this increases blood flow, idk. It maybe feels a little like that.
[Question] Plausibility of cyborgism for protecting boundaries?
re Q2-
So I don’t doubt that improvements in subjective wellbeing are reported essentially unanimously.
But, to give a sense of the kind of thing I’m expecting here, consider that a child who doesn’t learn to be emotionally insecure around their parents is probably much worse off. In some societies, parents who dislike a child starve/kill them, and emotional insecurity can be one way to predict and therefore avoid others disliking you.
In which case, I wonder, if you don’t have these common delusions about the mind (or you’re ~enlightened), does this put you in a worse place physically or socially?
(Probably not in all possible environments, but maybe this is true in some [social] environments that are common today.)
Some various questions:
Q1: To what extent do you think ~unenlightenment in an individual is caused by the need to fit in socially?
Ie: In order to get other people to take care of you or not kill you (especially when you’re a vulnerable child), you contort your mind in all sorts of ways and construct an ego (very much in the Elephant in the Brain way) and adopt all sorts of delusions.
For example, you might want to be able to control other people, and one way to do that is to exile your emotional emotions so you can tell them “You made me so angry! Stop doing that!” (Then later, if that doesn’t work, you can say, “I’m so sorry, my emotions got the best of me”—as if your emotions are separate from you, lol. Have your cake and eat it too.)
I write a little bit about how my experience of depression seems like this here.
Q1.b: To what extent do you think become more spiritually skilled is just about learning how to integrate with other people safely, but without having those common-but-helpful-but-wrong delusions about how your own mind works?
Q2: Do you think people benefit from being ~unenlightened or spiritually unskilled? Precisely how so?
whoa @Joe Carlsmith wrote a whole thing about boundaries I had no idea https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rdTgtHn3neGzkyCrL/being-nicer-than-clippy#Boundaries
taking something negative in one’s brain and asking, “but how is this useful? What is it doing for me? What is this piece of me trying to protect me from?”
yes yes this!
The Coherence Therapy Institute case studies are great for this btw
Just curious, how related do you think your symptoms are to social interaction?
Though they have very different methods, both anxiety and depression tend to have the same result, at least for me: I don’t do anything.
This reminds me of the post I wrote about my own depression: https://chipmonk.substack.com/p/depression-was-useful
I’d like to reply to your comment but I didn’t understand your first sentence
Where do you think the boundary is here?
How I turned doing therapy into object-level AI safety research
The curation failed? the email is empty for me
New version of this?
Me reading this post:
wow wtf these results, cool if true!
… * a bunch of explanation * …
*the post ends*
wait what did you actually do for “increasing cerebral vascularization and broadening my proprioception”?
What were your interventions?
Update: found them on your substack:
The method that I used consisted of targeted NIR interference therapy, short UV during the morning, a lot of inversion-based exercises where I focused on contracting/relaxing neck and face muscles, a few customized breathing exercises (think wim hof), figuring out the correct levels for a bunch of cholinergic vaso[dilators/modulators] (think noopept), massage therapies to reduce tension on the spine, some proprioception-heavy movement practices, a niche tibetan metta meditation series… and about 5 other things that are even harder to compress. The main point is that “the method” doesn’t matter so much, you can just google “intervention to increase IQ”, find 50 things, dig through the evidence, select 20, combine them, and assume 5 work
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I think the core point of “how” is really unimportant, since I didn’t do something optimal… not even close, I did something “silly” that I could execute part time with pocket change.
So I don’t want to bias people towards this particular method.
Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak:
https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1782095737096167917