Recent Ph.D. in physics from MIT, Complex Systems enthusiast, AI researcher, digital nomad. http://pchvykov.com
pchvykov
Karma: 145
Complexity Science as Bridge to Eastern Philosophy
Christianity vs. Tantra vs. Sex – one spiritual path?
Thanks for the kind words! I’m quite passionate about this work—so hearing that it’s helpful means a lot.
Questioning mediation as an end in itself is a good point, yes – I view it as a good goal instrumentally (i.e., making it a goal in itself is a helpful attitude, not arguing that it “should” be the actual goal). I find normative questions much harder than instrumental ones and prefer to avoid them.
Work as meditation
Academia as a happy place?
Yes—but I also find there are a number of dogmas in the LW community which are getting entrenched in group-think now and get immediate lashback when confronted. I feel like there used to be more openness to critically engage with unorthodox opinions 10 years ago or so...
Yes, thank you—this is exactly the pain-point of the LW community I anticipated this would trigger. And I think it’s a dogma—just a really deep one most of us aren’t willing to honestly confront. So thanks for bringing this up to the surface!
> “giving up hope gives cessation of suffering—but maintaining hope can produce real progress.”
- this is “real progress” only according to the materialist and Western value system—not some fundamental “true value.” We’re just so used to this paradigm we can’t imagine stepping outside of it—it’s the water we swim in. I explored this a bit in this post
> “there is less wanting and more enjoyment now”
- another assumption take for granted too much, a variant of historian’s fallacy. It’s hard to claim or even study this objectively since we don’t have access to subjective experience, especially of those that lived before us—so we tend to infer their subjective states using our values. Here I like the approach “of whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent” (Wittgenstein)
> “more in the future if we achieve aligned AGI”
- nice hope—if this works out, then perhaps this will be an example of “ultimate material success” bringing “unshakable bliss and safety”—sort of materialist enlightenment, restoring the symmetry between materialism and idealism
> “lie down and die”
- this is the most common misconception about Buddhism—that having no hope, no pain, no motivation, no need to change anything leads to inaction. Actually in the tradition, and also with specific people I’ve met who are high on the spiritual attainment—people without all these worries end up working more than I could ever imagine possible, and don’t seem to get tired or even sleep much. It seems paradoxical to our Western minds steeped in the idea that the only reason to move is to try to change things.
> “It is time for hope and struggle.”
- that is an implicit assumption that hope and struggle are instrumentally effective for reducing chances of apocalypse. Buddhism would argue otherwise—that hope and struggle will be precisely the cause of apocalypse. Looking at the poly-crisis materialism brought us to so far, this seems plausible to me.
> “I’d like to see this better summarized and advertised.”
- thanks for the suggestion—will add a TLDR in a moment
So here I’m referring to materialist philosophy—thought I do think materialistic values are an emergent property of that worldview, so not unrelated.
Also the view that “all science is downstream of physics” is wrong even within materialist philosophy, as it ignores emergence and spontaneous symmetry breaking, which give you substrate-independence—effectively that you could run the same high-level science on different hardware (so, e.g., run the same cognitive processes on biochemistry or on silicon—in which case the details of our fundamental understanding of biochemistry don’t matter for understanding cognition)
AI Apocalypse and the Buddha
Logic vs intuition ⇔ algorithm vs ML
Thanks for this—and sorry I missed it earlier. I marked a couple of your statements that especially hit me.
Overall great analysis—I’m only be a bit more positive about these things myself. Mainly:
I do think science is a tool that may be qualitatively different than all other tools we have—just looking at the impact it managed to have on the world. And in so far as it is “special,” it’s worth considering whether it can solve our problem
I don’t think it’s ever possible to completely understand the world—and so there will always be “God at the bottom of the glass”—no matter how much we do solve. I also don’t think there is anything bad about completely understanding some aspect of the world—our wonder just transitions to another aspect. Planetary motion no longer creates wonder, we take it for granted, and use it as a workhorse on which we build other things that do generate wonder (like “why are the laws what they are?”). The things we completely understand we just stop noticing really—but we start noticing other things. Driving a car becomes mundane once you’re good at it—but the road and places you can visit become exciting.
Great points—thanks for your thoughts on this! 2 questions:
1) Do you think it may be better to “wrap science in spirituality” instead? Or should we just leave them segregated as they are today?
2) My suggestion here was that we adjust what science is so that it no longer creates the problems you are pointing at. Specifically perhaps we can relax the “3rd person objective observer” paradigm and give more weight to 1st person perspective as well. I do believe that science can be quite spiritual and can generate well-being when it’s driven by genuine wonder, curiosity and intention to make life more wonderful. Does this fit with your thoughts?
Honest science is spirituality
So my understanding is that the more everyone uses this strategy, the more prices of different stocks get correlated (you sell the stock that went up, that drops its price back down), and that reduces your ability to diversify (the challenge becomes in finding uncorrelated assets). But yeah, I’m not a finance person either—just played with this for a few months...
Well if you take simple returns, then the naive mean and std gives . If you use log returns, then you’d get - which you can use to get if you need.
“Newton’s laws” of finance
Thanks for expanding on this stuff—really nice discussion!
Yeah that stock-market analogy is quite tantalizing—and I like the breadth that it could apply to.
For your discussion on “unnatural”—sure, I agree with the sentiment—but it’s the question of how to formalize this all so that it can produce a testable, falsifiable theory that I’m unclear on. Poetically it’s all great—and I enjoy reading philosophical treatise on this—but they always leave me wanting, as I don’t get something to hold onto at the end, something I can directly and tangeably apply to decision-making.
For your last paragraph, yeah that emphasis on “relational” perspective of reality is what I’m trying to build up and formalize in this post. And yes, it’s a bit hypocritical to say that “ultimately reality is relational” ;P
Great points—I’m more-or-less on-board with everything you say. Ontology in QM I think is quite inherently murky—so I try to avoid talking about “what’re really real” (although personally I find the Relational QM perspective on this to be most clear—and with some handwaving I could carry it over to QD I think).
Social quantum darwinism—yeah, sounds about right. And yeah, the word “quantum” is a bit ambiguous here—it’s a bit of a political choice whether to use it or avoid it. Although besides superpositions and tensor products, quantum cognition also includes collapse—and that’s now taking quite a few (yes, not all!) ingredients from the quantum playbook to warrant the name?
There can never be an “objective consensus” about what happens in the bomb cavity,
Ah, nice catch—I see your point now, quite interesting. Now I’m curious whether this bomb-testing setup makes trouble for other quantum foundation frameworks too...? As for QD, I think we could make it work—here is a first attempt, let me know what you think (honestly, I’m just using decoherence here, nothing else):
If the bomb is ‘live’, then the two paths will quickly entangle many degree of freedom of the environment, and so you can’t get reproducible records that involve interference between the two branches. If the bomb is “dud”, then the two paths remain contained to the system, and can interfere before making copies of the measurement outcomes.
Honestly, I have a bit of trouble arguing about quantum foundation approaches since they all boil down to the same empirical prediction (sort of by definition), most are inherently not falsifiable—so ultimately feel like a personal preference of what argumentation you find convincing.
Is it not the difference between having intrinsic probability in your definition of reproducibility and not having it?
I just meant that good-old scientific method is what we used to prove classical mechanics, statistical mechanics, and QM. In either case, it’s a matter of anyone repeating the experiment getting the same outcome—whether this outcome is “ball rolls down” or “ball rolls down 20% of the time”. I’m trying to see if we can say something in cases where no outcome is quite reproducible—probabilistic outcome or otherwise. Knightian uncertainty is one way this could happen. Another is cases where we may be able to say something more than “I don’t know, so it’s 50-50”, but where that’s the only truly reproducible statement.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts—cool ideas!
Yes, I’ve actually thought that human interactions may be well modeled as a stock-market… never actually looked into whether this has been done though. And yes, maybe such model could be framed using this network-type setup I described… could be interesting—what if different cliques have different ‘stock’ valuation?
″...the more unnatural said law is.”—the word ‘natural’ is a bit of a can of worms… I guess your statement could be viewed as an interesting definition of ‘natural’? E.g., in nonequilibrium stat mech you can quantify a lower-bound on energy expenditure to keep something away from the equilibrium distribution. E.g., I’ve thought of applying this to quantify minimum welfare spending needed to keep social inequality below some value. But here maybe you’re thinking more general? I just think ‘natural’ or ‘real self’ are really slippery notions to define. E.g., is all life inherently unnatural since it requires energy expenditure to exist?
“As if the brain experiences a linear combination of conflicting things.”—that’s precisely the sort of observations that Quantum Cognition models using quantum-like state-vectors. And precisely the sort of thing this framework I’m describing could help to explain perhaps.
“It feels sort of like a set trying to put itself inside itself?”—nice one! And there was a time when ancient Greek philosophers conclusively ‘proved’ to themselves the impossibility of ever fully understanding what matter is made of, and figured it’s better to spend time on moral philosophy. Now, the former is basically solved, and the latter is still very much open. So I don’t buy into no-go theorems much...
Great questions! I’m totally with you on this—so here are a few reasons I see:
research is now starting to show that mindfulness-based interventions can be harmful, not only helpful—so we need a theory to tell us how to use meditation correctly and effectively
On the complexity side—we have a poor understanding in science how to deal with the “observer”—the hard problem of consciousness, second order chaos in finance, social phenomena and structures. These traditions claim to understand it—perhaps they do?
more general—we are in need for a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world to solve the metacrisis. Perhaps these wisdom traditions have something that, when made appropriately rigorous, can help us understand how to human better—not just individually, but collectively (hence the need for a shared language).