A workable solution to the problem of other minds

Deciding whether other entities are also conscious is not an insoluble philosophical problem. It is tricky. A good analogy might be a wire puzzle. At a first glance, the piece you have to free looks completely locked. And yet a solution does exist, it just requires to represent a sufficiently large number of facts and features that our working memory is not enough.
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Usually showing the solution once will not fully satisfy one’s curiosity. It takes some time to develop a personally satisfying account. And to do so, we need to unpack how the various components interact with one another. After a while the reason why the free piece is not locked becomes intuitive, and at the same time you may also encounter mathematical arguments and principles to complement your understanding.
At first, though, the free piece looks and feels locked.
I think the problem of other minds is perceived similarly to a wire puzzle. At first it looks and feels insoluble. After a while, though, many suspect that the problem can be solved. This essay proposes a protocol that may point in the right direction. It could have some flaws as it is currently formulated, so I’m open to refinements of any kind. But I believe that it represents a drastic improvement over previous protocols, and it gets close to being a fully functioning proof of concept.
Starting from the basics: An approach that is widely discussed is the application of a Turing test. But a Turing test has several serious flaws when used as a test of consciousness. First, many conscious entities can’t pass a Turing test. So we know that it could have a very poor recall (missing most conscious entities). This problem is also present in every protocol I’m aware of. The major problem with it is that when an entity passes a Turing test, this can be counted as probabilistic evidence in favor of a large number of hypothesis, and not only to the desired conclusion that “this entity is conscious.” In principle highly persuasive chatbots could hack your entity recognition module by presenting hyperstimuli created by analyzing your biases for styles of conversation.
Your brain sees faces everywhere (cartoons, 2D computer screens, even clouds). It also sees entities where there are none. It might be much more simple to *trick* your judgement than actually create a sentient intelligence. Could the entity given the Turing test be an elaborate chatobot with no phenomenal binding? It seems likely that could take place.
Thus passing a Turing test is also not a guarantee that an entity is conscious. The method would have low recall and probably low accuracy too.
The second approach would be to simply *connect* your brain to the other entity’s brain (that is, of course, if you are not talking about a disembodied entity). We already have something like the Corpus Callosum, which seems to be capable of providing a bridge that solves the phenomenal binding problem between the hemispheres of a single person. In principle we could create a biologically similar, microfunctionally equivalent neural bridge between two persons.
Assuming physicalism, it seems very likely that there is a way for this to be done. Here, rather than merely observing the other person’s conscious experience, the point of connecting would be to become one entity. Strong, extremely compelling personal identity problems aside (Who are you really? Can you expect to ‘survive’ after the union? If you are the merged entity, does that mean you were always the same consciousness as the one with whom you merged?, etc. More on this on later posts), this possibility opens up the opportunity to actually corroborate that another entity is indeed conscious.
Indeed separate hemispheres can have very different opinions about the nature of reality. Assuming physicalism, why would it be the case that you can’t actually revert (or instantiate for the first time) the union between brains?

The previous idea has been proposed before. I think it is a significant improvement over the use of a Turing test, since you are directly addressing the main phenomenon in question (rather than its ripples). That said, the method has problems, and epistemic holes.  In brief, a big unknown is the effect that interfacing with another conscious experience has on both conscious experiences. For example, some people have (like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Brian Tomasik) argued that your interaction with the other brain could functionally expand your own mind. As it were, the interaction with the other brain could be interpreted as expanding your own mind by obtaining a large hardware upgrade. Thus it could be that the whole experience of being connected and becoming one with another entity is a fantasy of your recently-expanded mind. It can give you the impression that the other brain was already conscious before you were connected to it. So you can’t rule out that it was a zombie before and after the connection was over.
But there is a way out. And this is the stimulating part of the essay. Because I’m about to untangle the wires.
The great idea behind this solution is: Phenomenal puzzles. This one phenomenal puzzle linked here is about figuring out the appropriate geometry of color (arranging the state-space in an Euclidean manifold so that the degrees of subjective differences between colors are proportional to their distances). Doing this requires the ability of comparing the various parts of an experience to each other and being able to remember the comparison. In turn this can be iterated and generate a map of subjective differences. This is an instance of what I call qualia computing, where you need to be in touch with the subjective quality of your experience and to be capable of comparing sensations.
In brief, you want to give the other entity a puzzle that can only be solved by a conscious entity via manipulating and comparing qualia. The medium used to deliver the puzzle will be a first-person merging of brains: To share the puzzle you first connect with the entity you want to test.
By doing this, by sharing the puzzle when you are connected to the other entity, you will be able to know its inner referents in terms of qualia. While connected, you can point to a yellow patch and say “this is yellow.” Possibly, both halfs will have their own system of private referents (a natural consequence of having slightly different sense organs which make variable mappings between physical stimuli and qualia). But as a whole the merged entity will be able to compare notes with itself about the mapping of stimuli to qualia in both halfs. The entity could look at the same object from the point of view of its two heads at the same time and form an unified visual field, which incorporates the feed from the two former “personal-sized” visual fields (similarly to how you incorporate sensory stimuli from two eyes. Now you’ll see with four). The color appearance of the object could have a slightly different quality when the two visual fields are compared. That’s the fascinating thing about phenomenal binding. The differences in mappings between stimuli and qualia of the two former entities can be compared, which means that this difference can be analyzed and reasoned about and added to both repertoires of hippocampal snapshots of the current experience.
Then, when you disconnect from the other and there are two streams of consciousness going on again, you will both know what that “yellow” referred to. This overcomes the age-old problem of communicating private referents, and mutually agreeing on name for private referents. This way, the pieces of the (phenomenal) puzzle will be the same in both minds.
For the test to work, the specific question needs to stay secret until it is revealed briefly before merging.
Imagine that you have a set of standardized phenomenal puzzles. Psychologists and people who have done the test before tend to agree that the puzzles in the set do require you to explore a minimum number of states of consciousness. The tests have precise conceptual answers. These answers are extremely difficult to deliver by accident or luck.
The puzzles may require you to use external tools like an image editor or a computer. This is because computers can enable you to program combinations of sensory input in precise ways. This expands the phenomenal gamut you can reach. In turn one can calibrate sensory input to have nice properties (ex. use gamma correction).  The puzzles will also be selected based on the time sentient beings typically take to solve them.
When you want to perform the test, you meet with the entity right after you finish reading the phenomenal puzzle. The puzzle is calibrated to not be solvable in the time it will take you to connect to the other entity.
When you connect your brain to the other entity and become one conscious narrative, the entire entity reads the puzzle to itself. In other words, you state out loud the phenomenal puzzle by clearly pointing to the referents of the puzzle within your own “shared” experience. Then you disconnect the two brains.
In the time that the other entity is trying to solve the puzzle you distract yourself. This way you can prevent yourself from solving the puzzle. Ideally you might want to bring your state of consciousness to a very low activity. The other entity will have all of its stimuli controlled to guarantee there is no incoming information. All the “qualia processing” is going on through approved channels. When the entity claims to have solved the puzzle, at that point you connect your brain back to it.
Does the merged entity know anything about the solution to the puzzle? You search for a memory thread that shows the process of solving the puzzle and the eventual answer. Thanks to the calibration of this puzzle (it has also been given to “merged” entities before) we know you would need more time to solve it. Now you may find yourself in a position where you realize that if the other entity was a zombie, you would have somehow solved a phenomenal puzzle without using experience at all. If so, where did that information come from?
With the memory thread you can remember how the other entity arrived at the conclusion. All of the hard work can be attributed to the other entity now. You witness this confirmation as the merged entity, and then you disconnect. You will still hold redundant memories of the period of merging (both brains do, like the hemispheres in split-brain patients). Do you know the answer to the puzzle? You can now check your memory for it and see that you can reconstruct the answer very quickly. The whole process may even take less time than it would take you to solve the puzzle.
If you know the answer to the puzzle you can infer that the other entity is capable of manipulating qualia in the same way that you can. You would now have information that your mind/brain could only obtain by exploring a large region of the state-space of consciousness… which takes time. The answer to the puzzle is a verifiable fact about the structure of your conscious experience. It gives you information about your own qualia gamut (think CIELAB). In summary, the other entity figured out a fact about your own conscious experience, and explained it to you using your own private referents.
You can then conclude that if the entity solved the phenomenal puzzle for you, it must be capable of manipulating its qualia in a semantically consistent way to how you do it. A positive result reveals that the entity utilizes conscious algorithms. Perhaps even stronger: It also shares the generalizable computational power of a sapient mind.
Unfortunately just as for the Turing test, not passing this test is not a guarantee that the other entity lacks consciousness. What the test guarantees is a high precision: Near every entity that passes the test is conscious. And that is a milestone, I think.
Do you agree that the problem of other minds is like a wire puzzle?
Now go ahead and brainstorm more phenomenal puzzles!


The fire that breathes reality into the equations of physics

“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?” (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, Bantam Books, Toronto, 1988, p.174.)
I’m going to go with “the fire in the equations of physics is consciousness itself.”


Phenomenal Binding is incompatible with the Computational Theory of Mind

Daniel Dennet, in his multi-draft theory of consciousness explains that we have the belief that our consciousness is far more unified than it really is. This is true as far as it goes, experimentally and philosophically. Dennett and other philosophers of mind (and nearly everyone I’ve met who roots for him) take this one step further. The unity of consciousness is an illusion. This is not incidental, from a functionalist point of view any sort of unity of consciousness is not something you would actually be able to predict. Hence in order to justify that model the unity of consciousness that does exist has to be explained away somehow (as an “illusion” more often than not).
The need for a radically new paradigm, however, does not come from the idea that our consciousness is always fully unified in the sort of naïve way common sense tells us. It simply comes from the existence of some unity, any amount of unity, however little that is, because a purely computational account would not predict any sort of unity of the sort we see in consciousness.
I usually start with the following “your left and right visual field are currently being experienced as a unitary visual field.” Many object to this, in part perhaps because you can only focus your attention on one side at a time (awareness of the other side, as opposed to attention, does remain in most cases though). A more thoroughly indisputable instance of unitary consciousness is the fact that you can recognize objects, which itself requires instantaneous information unity. For example, you look at your hand, and you don’t only see it as a collection of shapes and colors, but you see it and recognize it as a “hand.” The very concept of a hand has implicitly in it a wide variety of pieces of information instantaneously joined together.
Some argue that the unity of consciousness is not good for anything. It is just an epiphenomenon. But it isn’t. You just need to look at what happens when it breaks down, as in the case of simultagnosia, schizophrenia or high doses of ketamine. Not being able to unify features of an experience into an integrated whole impairs the information processing that your mind typically accomplishes. So here is another big hint: Phenomenal binding is computationally relevant. I think that a strong argument could be made for “why we are conscious” by merely looking at the advantages of phenomenal binding over classical computers. If such advantages exist, they may explain why natural selection would have *recruited* consciousness as an information processing device instead of sticking to classical information processing.
Some people bring Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (Tonini) into the picture when asked about phenomenal binding. However, IIT does not provide a mechanism of action for the unity of consciousness. It *assumes it is the result of irreducible information*! IIT acknowledges that conscious states simultaneously represent multiple pieces of information in an indivisible whole. The problem, though, is that rather than asking “what is the mechanism of action for this unity?” the theory instead has a false start: It asks “under the assumption that the mind is a classical computer, what kind of physical systems would display integrated information?” But if you go out and look for integrated information in that sense, already defined within a classical paradigm, you already made a mistake. You assumed a specific framework for how the information gets integrated, one that cannot even in principle work. This is because the various parts of classical systems are not in direct instantaneous communication to each other. If you remove a part, the news that such part does not exist takes time to reach the other parts. And at a given time you cannot really define a “global state” because the changes in each part have not had the chance to influence the other parts.
In contrast to a classical system, each part of your local consciousness (whatever bundle IS unified, as opposed to the naïve view Dennett discredits) is instantaneously a part of a whole. A “whole.” due to delays in information propagation, cannot be defined in a classical system, and yet it is a central feature of consciousness.
In addition, in a classical system you can fully account for the emergent behavior by using a strict bottom-up approach. The large scale behavior is an emergent phenomena of the small-scale interactions (such as wetness being nothing but the interaction of water molecules). Contra classical systems, your consciousness has an instantaneous bottom-up *and* top-down relationship. Not only is the meaning of the whole determined by the interactions of the parts, but the nature of the parts are determined by the whole. An example of this is how when you see a cube, each of its square sides stops being just a square. They become “the sides of a cube.” The very nature of the experience of such squares as the sides of a cube cannot be accounted for without taking into account the entire experience.
The correct approach, I think, would be to focus on the unity of consciousness itself and ask “what sort of beast is this?” Not assume it has to be the result of some predefined process. Tentatively, I think that the way to investigate this would be to try to replace the corpus callosum with other machinery that is functionally identical in some sense. If we replace it by synthetic neurons that have the same macrofunctionality as biological neurons and the unity of consciousness breaks down, we would know that such unity is not accounted by simple information transmission in the classical sense. In addition, and in parallel, we could start a research program that seeks to define the computational advantages of consciousness over classical systems. Personally, I think this will be a very fruitful project, and will ultimately have tremendous applications (Better Computing Through Qualia!).


David Hamilton’s conversation with Alf Bruce about the nature of the mind

DH:
“It is important to note that some of the world’s foremost neuroscientists have believed that the mind is immaterial. These neuroscientists have been well aware that stimulating the brain can produce some intriguing psychological results. One of the pioneers in the field of neuroscience was Wilder Penfield. In his fascinating book The Mystery of the Mind, he writes the following:
{When I have caused a conscious patient to move his hand by applying an electrode to the motor cortex of one hemisphere, I have often asked him about it. Invariably his response was: ‘I didn’t do that. You did.’ When I caused him to vocalize, he said: ‘I didn’t make that sound. You pulled it out of me.’ When I caused the record of the stream of consciousness to run again and so presented to him the record of his past experience, he marveled that he should be conscious of the past as well as of the present. He was astonished that it should come back to him so completely, with more detail than he could possibly recall voluntarily. He assumed at once that, somehow, the surgeon was responsible for the phenomenon, but he recognized the details as those of his own past experience.} (76)

Penfield goes on to note that “There is no place in the cerebral cortex where electrical stimulation will cause a patient . . . to decide” (77). In light of his work as a neuroscientist, Penfield concludes the following: “For my own part, after years of striving to explain the mind on the basis of brain-action alone, I have come to the conclusion that it is simpler (and far easier and logical) if one adopts the hypothesis that our being does consist of two fundamental elements” (80).”
While it wouldn’t strictly debunk dualism if it weren’t true, the fact that neuroscience still has never found a way to convince a patient that they themselves made the decision to commit an action is highly intriguing. It doesn’t strictly prove dualism is true, either, but it does undercut the anti-dualist claims about how neuroscience shows that everything normally attributed to the mind can be produced by physical stimulation. The one thing dualism would most highly lead us to expect can’t be, it just so happens is one of the most significant exceptions to that rule.”
AB: In my perspective, the question of mind-body duality is like someone asking if the mind of Donald Duck exists outside Donald Duck’s body or not. It doesn’t matter, Donald Duck is a fictional character.
I believe that the mind is a myth. The self is an illusion, fiction.
Your true self consists of “emptiness”, “pure awareness”, an empty mirror that reflects the universe but don’t contain anything in itself.
In zen the koans are tools for trying to point out the direction to our “original self”, “our face that existed before our parents were born”.
And the world of senses, forms, thoughts, exists due to that we project it through active action through “our” “intentions” of thinking, sensing, pecieving, and that intentiion is is in itself an extension of the genetic programs “intention” to replicate and sustain itself (survival, metabolism).
The heart sutra says: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.Emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness.Whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form.”
Brain transformed guy UG Krishnamurti describes it in an entertaining way, he wrote a book named “The mind is a myth”
U. G. Krishnamurti: Complete Part 1 – Mystique of Enlightenmenthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXyLbU1GGqU
Sam Harris has some nice descriptions,
Sam Harris: The Self is an Illusion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fajfkO_X0l0
One classic example:Emperor Wu: “So what is the highest meaning of noble truth?”Bodhidharma: “There is no noble truth, there is only emptiness.”Emperor Wu: “Then, who is standing before me?”Bodhidharma: “I know not, Your Majesty.”
And one of my favourites on this issue is Aldous Huxleys Doors of perception: Seeing the mind as a filter for consciousness, clear white light that gets filtered trough our human bodies and creates a prism of colours on the other side that appears to us as a separate consciousness.
Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception excerpt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9eD7oSX7dg
DH: That is, of course, however, itself a form of dualism – extremely so, in fact; and while it bears some superficial similarities with the extreme materialist line that the self is an illusion because consciousness doesn’t exist at all because there’s no room for it in a physical world, no eliminative materialist would take that sort of *attitude* towards it as a result of their belief. But whether dualistic (or idealistic) or materialistic views are plausible, possible, and likely as opening stating points still sets the tone of a debate which the position you’re expressing there is a complicated point on one of the branches of.
Without breaking spoilers, I think your comments about scare-quote “intentions” borrow too much from the extreme materialist, rather than idealistic tone of the rest of your comments, and in fact I argue from precisely the opposite line: intentionality itself, as a category of types of phenomena in the world, is indispensable. Someone who thinks we’re just the epiphenomena of blindly causal building blocks lacking intentionality has to think any “intentionality” we possess is just the illusory epiphenomena of the causal pseudo-intentionality of those building blocks. But, as I’ll argue, such a project is absolutely utterly impossible. That leaves us, I claim, with a stark choice between either eliminating intentionality (an extremely dehumanizing option that is both untenable and would erase a huge portion of what all of us value about the experience of being human if it even {could be} true), or else acknowledging it as an irreducible aspect of the irreducibly experiential and mental side of reality.
I’m definitely a fan of Huxley’s conception in Doors of Perception, but in an of itself, nothing about this concept requires that the consciousness being so filtered is a “universal” or “empty” one rather than potentially being an individual one, and perhaps even one with some degree of intrinsic content.
William James proposed an equivalent metaphor: “When the physiologist who thinks that his science cuts off all hope of immortality pronounces the phrase, “Thought is a function of the brain,” he thinks of the matter just as he thinks when he says, “Steam is a function of the tea-kettle,” “Light is a function of the electric circuit,” “Power is a function of the moving waterfall.” In these latter cases the several material objects have the function of inwardly creating or engendering their effects, and their function must be called productive function. Just so, he thinks, it must be with the brain. Engendering consciousness in its interior, much as it engenders cholesterin and creatin and carbonic acid, its relation to our soul’s life must also be called productive function. Of course, if such production be the function, then when the organ perishes, since the production can no longer continue, the soul must surely die. Such a conclusion as this is indeed inevitable from that particular conception of the facts.
But in the world of physical nature productive function of this sort is not the only kind of function with which we are familiar. We have also releasing or permissive function; and we have transmissive function.
The trigger of a crossbow has a releasing function: it removes the obstacle that holds the string, and lets the bow fly back to its natural shape. So when the hammer falls upon a detonating compound. By knocking out the inner molecular obstructions, it lets the constituent gases resume their normal bulk, and so permits the explosion to take place.
In the case of a colored glass, a prism, or a refracting lens, we have transmissive function. The energy of light, no matter how produced, is by the glass sifted and limited in color, and by the lens or prism determined to a certain path and shape. Similarly, the keys of an organ have only a transmissive function. They open successively the various pipes and let the wind in the air-chest escape in various ways. The voices of the various pipes are constituted by the columns of air trembling as they emerge. But the air is not engendered in the organ. The organ proper, as distinguished from its air-chest, is only an apparatus for letting portions of it loose upon the world in these peculiarly limited shapes.
My thesis now is this: that, when we think of the law that thought is a function of the brain, we are not required to think of productive function only; we are entitled also to consider permissive or transmissive function. And this the ordinary psycho-physiologist leaves out of his account.”
And, in the source lecture on Human Immortality [http://godconsciousness.com/humanimmortality.php], elaborated it as so: “In note 5 on page 58 I partially guarded against it by saying that the “mother sea” from which the finite mind is supposed to be strained by the brain, need not be conceived of in pantheistic terms exclusively. There might be, I said, many minds behind the scenes as well as one. The plain truth is that one may conceive the mental world behind the veil in as individualistic a form as one pleases, without any detriment to the general scheme by which the brain is represented as a transmissive organ.If the extreme individualistic view were taken, one’s finite mundane consciousness would be an extract from one’s larger, truer personality, the latter having even now some sort of reality behind the scenes. And in transmitting it — to keep to our extremely mechanical metaphor, which confessedly throws no light on the actual modus operandi– one’s brain would also leave effects upon the part remaining behind the veil; for when a thing is torn, both fragments feel the operation.And just as (to use a very coarse figure) the stubs remain in a check-book whenever a check is used, to register the transaction, so these impressions on the transcendent self might constitute so many vouchers of the finite experiences of which the brain had been the mediator; and ultimately they might form that collection within the larger self of memories of our earthly passage, which is all that, since Locke’s day, the continuance of our personal identity beyond the grave has by psychology been recognized to mean.It is true that all this would seem to have affinities rather with preëxistence and with possible re-incarnations than with the Christian notion of immortality. But my concern in the lecture was not to discuss immortality in general. It was confined to showing it to be not incompatible with the brain-function theory of our present mundane consciousness. I hold that it is so compatible, and compatible moreover in fully individualized form. The reader would be in accord with everything that the text of my lecture intended to say, were he to assert that every memory and affection of his present life is to be preserved, and that he shall never in sæcula sæculorum cease to be able to say to himself: “I am the same personal being who in old times upon the earth had those experiences.””
Still, establishing the baseline that the materialistic, “productive” account of consciousness is not the only rationally considerable or rationally believable option is a prerequisite before that debate between us can even take place. Should the “productive” account be the only possibility, both of us are necessarily mistaken, and we aren’t even entitled to try to have that conversation. If and when we establish that dualistic and/or idealistic accounts truly can be worthy of consideration in principle in the first place, then we can perhaps try to move forward on arguing the specifics.
AB: I don’t really think of it in terms of materialism or idealism, to me that is more western style concepts, I have more of a background in eastern concepts, they are more natural and comfortable for me to use.
There is a buddhist concept called “dependent origination”;So if I try to translate it, it will be as I am fully a materialist and fully an idealist “at the same time”.
I don’t know if you are into low level computer languages, but a methaphor in C programming, when you ask for data, built in the question, you declare what shape of data you are looking for, and where to look before you get the data, so: That means that the answer you get, it’s based on the question you made.
A similar methaphor is the double slit experiment in quantum physics; The instant you look for idealism, idealism is the answer you get, the instant you look for materialism, materialism is the answer you get.
I had an altered state of conciousness after doing zen meditation some year ago, where I saw stuff that has been describet by Viktor Frankl, Eckhart Tolle amongst others: It was like: Aha the universe is in constant motion, the instant I make some kind of mental construct about the nature of the universe, my mental construct gets disconnected, from the universe, the mental constructs become false the same moment they are constructed. Usually my brain automatically interprets the input that reaches my senses, but now I can see there is a space between input-stimulus and response, that I haven’t noticed before.
DH: {{Your true self consists of […] “pure awareness”}}
Whether you like categorizing it in those terms or not, a claim of this sort is either dualist or idealist, and if materialism is true, this claim is false. Concepts are, as Alan Watts put it, something like fish nets thrown over the world to map it out rather than something describing the way the world really is in and of itself, but regardless of that fact, the “Western” concepts are one way of mapping the territory no less valid than any other, and it *is true* that anything floating in the ocean is going to fall into one of the spaces inside the net. What you’re describing here, with the exception of one tiny nuance that borrows premises from a worldview your other statements have flatly rejected, is unavoidably non-materialist.
AB: I don’t really care if a claim is either dualist or idealist, as I see it, all claims are ultimately false the moment you make the claim, since the universe is a constant flux, you cannot step in the same river twice as Herakleitos described it. ( I think being on Ketamine activates a kind of awareness of this state in a way)
I see it as the “true” state of the world is “paradoxical” “self contradictionary”, and as soon we put out our mental “fish nets” over the world, we get stuck in the nets, and lose our authentic connection to the world.
If you look at zen koans, they have no answer, that can be reached by logic or thinking, they are tools for trying to force yourself to step out of the fishnet, and plunge yourself into the floating ocean.
(Perhaps we are talking past each other, right now I’m quite tired and have somewhat hard to concentrate and think)
DH: “[A] all claims are ultimately false the moment you make the claim, since [B] the universe is a constant flux, you cannot step in the same river twice as Herakleitos described it.”
Is [B] true? Is it true that there is a logical relationship between[B] and [A], so that the truth of [A] follows from the truth of [B]?
AB: There ulimately cannot be a relationship between [A] and [B].The truth of [A] cannot follow the truth of [B].
Because, when you read and make up the sentence in your head, the act of reading the sentence is a process in time.
Your eyes goes from the beginning of the sentence to the end of the sentence, but when you reach the end of the sentence, the beginning of the sentence is not “valid” anymore, since the universe have changed shape.
So in that way, logic itself will ultimately always be invalid.
But you can make logic valit within its own self contained system, but that is ultimately a “pseudo” system, its disconnected from reality, one gets stuck in the fishing net.
The staues of Dancing Shiva, he dances on a dwarf, The dwarf symbolizes “logic” among other things. The dwarf will always be there, it’s immortal. But Shiva dances outside all logical systems, always in motion.
DH: “[C] […] There ulimately cannot be a relationship between [A] and [B]. The truth of [A] cannot follow the truth of [B]. […] So in that way, logic itself will ultimately always be invalid.
[D] Because, when you read and make up the sentence in your head, the act of reading the sentence is a process in time. […] Your eyes goes from the beginning of the sentence to the end of the sentence, but when you reach the end of the sentence, the beginning of the sentence is not “valid” anymore, since the universe have changed shape.”
Are any of the statements in [D] true? Is there any logical relationship between any of the statements in [C] and any of the statements in [D], such that the truth of [C] follows from the truth of [D]? If not, how is your use of the word “because” not implying the opposite and therefore employing a fallacy of stolen concept, and are you not therefore compelled to refrain from using it?
AB: Is there an answer to your question, if you haven’t even began to ask any question?
DH: Does a world still in fact exist, in which you are dreaming, and which your dreaming self will inevitably wake up into, when you are asleep?
AB: Depends on if the world you wake up to, also happen to be another dream.
DH: Dream-worlds still {{-exist-}}, whether they exist as “dream-worlds” or regular “worlds.” The question was whether a world exists, not in what form it does, so that doesn’t actually answer the question.
AB: As I see it, the active act of looking for something, itself in a way creates something to look at.
Gonna go to sleep now. Thanks for the brain gymnastics.
I assume that I already have posted this one to you, I still think it’s cool. Perhaps one can see it as Shiva represents the idealist perspective, and Kali represents the materialist perspective, and that ulitmately, if ones goes beyond the fishing net, one can come to realize that they are two sides of the same coin. cya later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gam77q_LQJA


This post want to apologize for last posts’ overzealous marketing

This post, though, does agree that commercial applications of phenomenal binding are certain to be a hit in the future.


Make + $$$$ from HOME, guaranteed. Achieve all your professional goals with qualia computing. Use the power of phenomenal binding for computational efficiency never before seen and get rich QUICK!

Breathing qualia in your qualiafield
Would you believe it? QualiaTATIVELY superior!
Use the computational comparative advantage of phenomenal binding to obtain polynomial running times rather than exponential. Maximize your potential by using qualia computing algorithms. Polynomial experience, super low super effective running time guaranteed. Save money and space. Low prices! Save money, time and effort with polynomial time experience of your algorithms. Adaptable to 30% of all computational needs known.
Qualia is superior to serial computing in the search of unconceived ideas. Serial computing can be optimized to be better than qualia systems for pre-established models. But for model conception in a larger space, qualia is the only viable candidate.
DON’T MISS OUT THE QUALIA TRAIN the qualia train will depart and the discoveries will be made. It is about to blow up, as an industry, be the first in your social circle to use qualia computing services.


Manifolds of Consciousness: The emerging geometries of iterated local binding

The qualia manifolds
Ever noticed implicit geometries in the structure of the qualia you deal with on a daily basis?
So here is one observation about our experience. Visual experience has two major dimensions and one minor one (depth). This sensory modality is experienced as either 2 or 3 dimensional (and ambiguous points in between are also instantiated at times). Now, it also has a specific kind of topological features. It seems that the edges of the visual field are the edges of a patch in Euclidean space. The edges are not connected to each other. At first, it might take you by surprise to consider hypothetical visual fields with edges that are actually connected. Maybe you could make it a torus, by connecting edges left and right as well as those at the top and the bottom of the visual field. It’ll make a manifold of experience. You may also twist it before connecting it, making a Klein bottle or a projective plane.
Real Projective Plane. Imagine your visual field connected to itself in this way by twisting and joining the edges.
A common reaction to this idea is “it may be impossible to do that, maybe the geometry of our visual field is the only possible one.” Without actually going ahead and interfering with your mind and brain directly it is unlikely I’ll be able to show conclusively it is possible. But there is a strong intuition pump available to help you conceive of the possibility.
So, touch your arm. Your writs more specifically. Using a finger make a circle around the wrist. You end up where you started, and yet you only advanced in one direction.


The Real Tree of Life

Remember, kids, the ‘Tree of Life’ is not a metaphor. It is an actual 4-dimensional object. It starts with the first living photocell and its leaves are us, the plants, the fungi, the bacteria, the virus you see all around, right now, here. We are all physically interconnected in the space-time continuum. Our branches meet to eat, to mate and play. We will always be one complex macro-organism.

The Real Tree of Life


Phenomenal puzzles – CIELAB

Answer sheet to phenomenal puzzle #1:
Phenomenological studies reveal that we have three major qualia-poles that compose all experienced colors. Luminance is the first: How subjectively bright is it? The other two: We obtain red and green on two opposite sides, and blue and yellow on the normal of that pole.

(http://www.rpdms.com/cielch/labsphere2.jpg)
The qualia that you are now experiencing on the left of your sensorium must match the schema to your right. Allow some room for normal human drawing errors. Is the chart similar enough to the subject’s solution to warrant a positive result?

Materials: Tester (t), neural bridge (nb), and entity (e).
Protocol: t and e must read the protocol. Let t read the promt of the phenomenal puzzle. Connect t’s brain to e’s brain with the nb at time t = 0. Adjust the connection setting to 1st person merging (fully unified sense of self). Phenomenal binding between brains is achieved. In that state, the equivalence between qualias in, say, vision, can be established. The united mind determines the relationship between visual qualias of both sub units (like a person would compare the feeling in both her hands). Then from the memory of t the entire being retells the puzzle using the available qualia, so that he visualizes what has to be solved in both of its subunits. Then both brains are disconnected.
During the phase that follows after the first disconnection e attempts to solve the phenomenal puzzle on its own. All of the sensory stimuli to e are carefully controlled to prevent any form of leakage of the solution. e is allowed to use visual aids such as computer programs that help him manipulate his experience with great freedom.
At the same time, one needs to carefully control the mental state of t. The particular sensory input t receives is less important than guaranteeing that t does not make the sort of cognitive moves that would lead to an answer to the puzzle. For instance, distractions are great ways of doing this.
If the puzzle has been ‘standardized’ to be solved within a given range of time (its ecological difficulty has been assessed widely) one waits that amount and then reconnect t’s and e’s brain.
In that second period of union, the united entity assesses e’s solution to the phenomenal puzzle. If it has been solved, then t will be able to conclude that e is conscious even when they are disconnected. For e to have that certainty the roles will have to be reversed.

The puzzle itself
What are the axis of phenomenal color? Draw a map of color that separates it into phenomenally continuous colors at the same distance in terms of subjective difference.

Phenomenal puzzles – CIELAB


The psychedelic future of consciousness

What can 1,800,000 human days per day accomplish?
Imagine the events that happen in a city of near two million persons. How much thinking is done? How many atypical views about the nature of reality take place in the sunny hours of a city of this size?
Psychedelic experiences are eventful, so they have to be weighted more than typical days in any sum total of the quantity of conscious events and conscious luminance. Not to say, the local consciousness flux capacity co-peaks with the peak of an entheogenic trip.
Now imagine, 1,800,000 humans who dedicate their lives to serious psychedelic and consciousness research. A large fraction of this population is experienced in employing psychedelic states of consciousness for qualia-computing applications (that is, for applications suited to the specific state of consciousness, that takes advantage of the computational trade-offs of different states of consciousness to perform certain operations more efficiently). Another large fraction frequently interacts with people reporting from myriad kingdoms of consciousness (which are as different from one another as you could say the kingdoms of life are to each other).
Many of them develop computational models of the dynamics of qualia for a living. They study how varieties of consciousness interact with one another. They ask questions like: How quickly can a conscious experience intensify? What is the function that maps present content of conscious experience to the set of conceivable ideas? How fast can phenomenal yellow be transformed/substituted by phenomenal blue?
They develop probabilistic models that predict the possible transitions between states of consciousness, at all time scales. In the microsecond domain, we see resonant chambers of qualia filaments dynamically modifying manifolds of experience with variable Fourier transforms. In the ‘real-subjective-time’ scale, we would see the change from one emotional state into another. The differential equations that govern the possible affective transitions between emotions in a sober state would have long been figured out. Predicting those equations for hypothetical states of consciousness which are then found in the lab (well, the psychedelic research center) is where the field’s at.
Other people develop connections between consciousness and mathematics themselves. Philosophy of qualiamatics. After all, the semantic content of a mathematical propositions is enclosed within and a part of the experience of doing and thinking mathematics. The engineering of semantically rich states of consciousness is now of interest to pure mathematics researchers, if for no other reason than to improve their investigative mathematical skills. Drugs and techniques that specifically target the kind of meaning-making useful for mathematics are developed and used by many.
And others do a whole flip within and study the nature of philosophical thought. If you are an astute reader, you’ll notice that philosophy of the science of consciousness (just as there is philosophy of the science of physics!) cannot be complete without an understanding of philosophy through the science of consciousness. While first dismissed as a simple circularity, a play of words, universities now offer serious classes on (1) the phenomenal quality of philosophy of consciousness, and (2) the philosophical implications of the science of the consciousness of philosophy. And as you may expect, both courses have a required lab component.
People have been working for a few decades already in the creation of an agreed-upon map of the varieties of conscious experience. Most of the daily experience of most of the persons alive belong to some of the few large and broad regions of the state-space of consciousness defined in standard charts available everywhere. There is also knowledge about general regions (i.e. kinds of experiences) to completely avoid, given their intrinsically negative subjective character. However, a sizable minority of states of consciousness are still completely unclassified and unclassifiable given the present vocabulary and shared conceptions. It is not that these states are in principle inaccessible to scientific study. Instead, there either is no reliable way of reproducing the states, or the current degrees of freedom don’t allow researchers to compare them to other states of consciousness.
Yes, it is true that in some sense every state of consciousness is inconmensurable to every other state. But you can always put them side by side in a phenomenally bound entity and see what happens. Subjective affinities can be quantified, and subsequent behavior is measurable. Consistent findings tend to happen, unless there is an intrinsically chaotic result, in which case that fact is noted. The vast majority of the state space of consciousness remains undiscovered, unexplored, and unconceived. And yet, general key principles of consciousness (such as relationships between behavior and intrinsic quality) are already known and applied widely in the exploration of uncharted states of consciousness. What shamans, psychologists and even philosophers of the past did more or less as an art (with 99.9% of practice time) is now done systematically, more thoroughly and better recorded (with no practice time needed) via technologically enhanced thinking.
Just as the mathematical characterization of tiny physical components of matter in the 19th century led to the development of computing machines made of tiny systems in the 20th century, we now see the mathematical formalisms of the behavior of consciousness are paying off computationally. The computational advantages of phenomenal binding are harnessed in the processing of information in a way that is far superior to digital computers. With the integration of semantics modules of thought, and mathematical renderers, conscious experience can quickly explore vast regions of possibility space. Now thinking about the nature of the possible has been transformed from an art to an engineering discipline.
Qualia treasures are discovered all the time. What used to be a person’s peak experience in a lifetime (a moment of transcendent delight from which the rest of the cosmos seems more profound and deeply significant than at any other point in life) are now a possible baseline of consciousness for many experimental subjects and artists of the mind alike. Yet, there are far greater and significant worlds of qualia discovered from time to time. And there is no sign that the rate of discoveries will slow down. Like prime numbers, perhaps, the interval between them increases as you find the ones closer to zero, and yet you are guaranteed to find one if you keep counting.
Needless to say, the discoveries of qualia treasures are welcomed by the general population, who get to try them and delight in them after robust accessing methods are proved safe. Qualia safety engineers work hard to avoid even the presence of the conceivability of a problem in a qualia world shipped to the general public.
Imagine, 1,800,000 researchers conducting all of this work on a daily basis. That’s a possible future. A very possible, perhaps inevitable one. Perhaps you are unaware of it, but this is a fact: We are at the edge of something big, unimaginably big.

The psychedelic future of consciousness


Not zero-sum

Happiness, intelligence and longevity are not zero-sum games. If someone becomes smarter, more compassionate and driven to success in a holistic way, we all benefit.
Sadly, a lot of the commentary on transhumanist technologies by the media and mainstream outlets tends to focus on the idea of fairness using a purely zero-sum framework.
“Is it unfair if students use tDCS to improve performance?” should be replaced by “how can tDCS be applied to improve people’s intellectual development in a way that benefits us all?”

Not zero-sum


Discussion of Fanaticism

Anonymous Source

Do people not realize that what makes them cheer and applaud and boo is also what makes them heil? Probably. And that’s unfortunate, because people will form higher level beliefs that reinforce fanaticism, which is the force in question, as something necessary in society. It’s only necessary in a conservative estimate, though. Fanaticism is the fire perpetually fighting other fire. It is the patriotism against treachery. And it is integral in our emotions of annoyance, contempt, anger, hate, prejudice, as well as pride, admiration, humility, etc.. Which is why we’d be giving up a lot of life if we could eliminate fanaticism. We’d suffer less but we’d also have less of what current purposes captivate us. We’d lose our humanness. What would reptiles do with all that intelligence? Well, they’d cooperate and rationally act to develop a peaceful society. They wouldn’t love and they wouldn’t shimmy to the soundtrack of their proud egos. So a good idea is to compartmentalize whenever possible and with better design. That is, we might do well to notice this hair trigger tendency to mindless hate and disapprove and feel “morally disgusted” by things as well as the equally destructive tendency to rave and rally and praise and worship, to notice our debilitating tendency to feel unworthy as well as our debilitating tendency to become proud and feel self-assured, entitled, loud and indignant.
Fanaticism comes in two forms. There’s the active form. That’s the angry or praising form that you see in the “booing” in this song. It seems to be connected most with anger and hate. Then there’s passive fanaticism. That’s those catty back-handed insults in Entertainment News culture. But watch out again for active form in UpWorthy, the liberals who will jump down my throat for the stereotype that becomes explicit when I change “Entertainment News culture” to “upper class Hollywood female and gay/effeminate male culture,” if I dared. I feel them now, growling at their posts just ready for me to confirm that I affirmed a thought that is in some context sexist or discriminatory. How the fanatical feminists are enraged for being compared to Nazi’s in the derogatory term “feminazi,” believing themselves to be above Nazi’s (thus having contempt and being appalled) and having rage, thus proving themselves to have the emotional and behavioral traits that were exactly meant by the term “feminazi.” (But such backfires when you use it in a derogatory way, as that too is an act of fanaticism. One fanatical groups’s heretic in this case the clueless “feminazi.”) But don’t they realize, sexism, racism, etc., pervade all our thoughts, and it’s only a lack of critical correction and a lack of love and an intention to harm that is destructive? Probably not. They are the rabid conservative youth in disguise of liberal multiculturalism. But it’s the rabidity that’s the problem. It’s the nipping, the booing, the “calling out,” the combating and debating, the rapping, the show down, the victory and defeat, that is all there is and ever will be to war and what makes people suffer. (But at the same time, remember that blond long hair kid on the internet video who calls out his teacher, who preaches the truth, and has a heroic victory. The glory of the warrior, the leader, the pioneer, the innovator, the activist depends equally on fanaticism). And often people will do this fanaticism with an exaggerated or imaginary set of the stakes at hand, and will fight at all costs, being the harsh police force for whatever cause they represent, and punishing with a sense of urgency those who must be punished.
Active fanaticism is clear. Passive fanaticism is different. I must confess. I have high levels of passive fanaticism. Passivity in general but particularly passive fanaticism is associated ultimately with some form of fear. That’s what reverence is. That’s what awe is. Humility and self-deprecating Dobby. It’s when your voice trembles because of the implication of what you’re saying, often in a conversation where two people are energetically agreeing about something, probably some moral/ethical judgement about human conduct. And it moves me. I was and always have been very mild mannered, except for the compensating part of me which is outrageous, a mixture of both of which is displayed in this very status. I’ve always felt a strong sense of a teacher being my superior and wanting so much to be compliant and goody goody. And if I ever corrected a teacher I’d avoid it, but if it just flowed in the conversation then I’d try to do it in a most indirect and gentle way as possible, and I’d feel the same energy of fanaticism, but it would be uncomfortable and I’d gulp and tremble and rather not have gotten the teacher to admit the error. No wonder it might have brought me to tears. And no wonder when I watched the 2012 (or was it 2008?) Chinese Olympics opening, watching an eerie field of obedient subservience, instead of the insistent outrage or pride that comes with a sense of entitlement and strength in the active fanaticism, my passive fanaticism was triggered by the human power display, and I felt humbled along with them, and almost got a bitter sweet strong gust of fanaticism to think, “Wow, they’d do that for their leader, that is so good, kind and sweet,” when the legions of people appeared from underneath the boxes, the face of reverent mass servitude. It’s the same feeling when you say the anthem or listen to Martin Luther King’s speech “I have a Dream.” Again, doing away with fanaticism doesn’t seem like the best option, because even in a hypothetical world where there is no racism because fanaticism has been eliminated, we would lose the beautiful human brotherhood ideas of MLK’s speech or Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” and those are damn good joy’s! But watch out, because it spreads like fire, and soon erupts a full spectrum of ugly and destructive fanatical events.
And fanaticism has probably come into existence as a society forming mechanism. Our ancestors probably became more functional as they gradually accreted a social nature whereby they can inflict shame on others with enough contemptuous confidence, intimidate others to feel proud, and feel ashamed and defeated and get out of the way of those who didn’t make whatever mistake it was that was unacceptable to the community resulting in the trial and shame. We’ve seen this in modern times when feelings and actions of patriotism or non-patriotism were debated as matters of national security. And I would assume that the conservatives who would argue that “in these times of crisis” unpatriotic sentiment be witch-hunted out, haha, or rather, how they’d word it, were themselves biased. And fanaticism has been around for a while and survived it’s own social system natural selection. It’s taken on a life of it’s own in sports, religion, gossip, the arts, romantic courtship, competitions of all sorts, and any longstanding social institution, almost like a society of different fanatical systems feeding on the human society they created. We are the hosts of fanaticism systems. Fanatico-ideological hybrids feed on our lives like we’re a basic renewable resource to them, which we are. It’s quite amazing once you see the ways it’s infiltrated the moves we make in life and ensured its continued survival. But fanaticism is based just on an emotion that we have as a result of our social nature and have in response to environmental systems, and we can recognize it. I feel it in my throat and chest and my eyes water. But just pay attention, the next time you hear yourself clapping, booing, cheering, saluting, “respecting,” revering, hating, loving, degrading, admiring, praising, etc.., and pay attention, because this is the moment where all there is to war and human turmoil and all there ever might be to the potential for human life is born. This moment of human fanatical social emotion, connected to all the things that’s important to us, can be seen as making our life fulfilling, promising useful applications, or causing harm, sustaining ignorant, irrational life destroying systems.
Roseanne, I Liam, in a contained and mindful act of fanaticism commend you for your lack of solemnity and use of humor in a place where people rabidly and fearfully demand solemnity and mindlessly boo you. But look. I just used “mindlessly” in a fanatical way, to degrade them, and imply they are stupid and meet other typical fanatical criteria for social rejection. Anybody who has joked or made light of disasters and atrocities, I commend you as well. I cannot escape fanaticism and can’t ideally harness fanaticism, especially in actions like these, public ones, which are subject to the chaos of other fanaticism ignorance misinterpretation rashness, etc., but hay compartmentalized love and humor doesn’t necessarily give rise to an equal and opposite hate in the reverse circumstance, and not all fanaticism has to be fundamentally bad. Actually, if you identify as a libertarian, what do you think about this? How old are you?
Fanaticism is everywhere. From the basic interpretations of every motive of every human gesture, such as the mock-formal style of declaration I, Liam, used above. Everyone is always watching to go “oh snap, oh no he didn’t” and that has filled all our evaluations of actions with fanatical interpretations. We can’t escape it. Let’s just be careful. And also, in trying to be careful, I don’t any longer want to commend Roseanne or anyone, because now I’m recognizing that even that mild statement on such a hot topic is divisive and provocative, and I don’t mean to be contentious or involve fanaticism at all, except what’s require to get your attention and appeal to you not thinking I look ridiculous typing up this long status on my facebook wall. Now maybe I look cowardly for trying to be so agreeable, but watch that fanaticism there. Especially the fraternity bros have this sadistic hate of, they use a term that begins with the letter “p,” less macho guys. Anyways, let’s just be careful and aware, and even more careful and aware still. Uh, oh, that sounded bossy and corny, and also like I’m a narc or a wet blanket. So uncool… Oh, there’s fanaticism yet again in the cool/uncool appraisals. It’s inescapable.

Discussion of Fanaticism


What does comparatively matter in 2015?

This is based on my experience of what people are generally focused on. And what really, comparatively, matters.
First, a lot of people seem to place all their eggs in the basket of AI. Specifically, AI based on current computer architectures. Ethically, in terms of effective altruism, and in terms of raw efficiency. Even in terms of consciousness, for most people who care about consciousness.
This would be absolutely rational if you had a reason to think that a von Neumann computer architecture could solve the phenomenal binding problem. But since there is no reason to think it would, the effort seems fundamentally misguided. Not in intention, or in terms of correct effort. Understanding intelligence and consciousness are of prime importance. Indeed, far more important than what most human thoughts are directed at.
That said, this misguided effort will still be of tremendous value. By having people focus on computing in a utilitarian and philosophically motivated way, we will do a lot of progress in the area, faster. Which is absolutely great, in general. Being highly competent, as a civilization, in computing technologies is a great start! But it is not the end. At some critical point, people will realize that phenomenal binding itself has to be addressed. What is it? Why do brains solve it? Do brains solve it on their own?
A sufficient number of people are working on that already, that focusing on what will be the focus in the future is nonetheless what has the comparative importance. What is it? Well, consciousness studies themselves. Without assuming that your particular procedure of choice (which currently happens to be statistical learning by serial computers for most people who think about this) will produce consciousness. you can go ahead and study consciousness itself. But what do you study here? You can’t, so far, put consciousness in a petri dish and analyze its chemical structure.
What you can do, however, is to study the computational capabilities of consciousness. Thus, infer its computational role in the survival of species. By describing what consciousness is capable of in rigorous mathematical ways, you can reverse-engineer the reasons why natural selection recruited it as the medium for representing world-simulations.
More so, I predict that by reverse engineering consciousness’ computational capabilities, a wide variety of new applications will be discovered. We will find how to solve a variety of computationally challenging problems using conscious experience. The computational comparative advantage of consciousness, as a computing substrate, will be revealed. Such comparative advantage must exist to begin with, or natural selection would not have recruited consciousness to solve problems related to representing the environment.
How do we study this comparative advantage?
Look, I don’t know. There could be many obvious ways of doing so that simply escape me right now. After all, not many persons are thinking along these lines (and thus, again, why starting to work on this is comparatively highly efficient). But I will start by making sense of visual experience. I think that by characterizing our visual pattern recognition abilities in computational ways we can start to make a headway in describing qualia’s computational capabilities. Of course visual experience is a very specific kind of qualia. It also happens to be one where a lot of functional properties can be mathematically captured. We represent a 3D Euclidian space. Not any space. And thus many geometrically grounded questions can be formulated. For example:
How fast do the interpretation about the visual scenery propagate?
To what extend do the local *interpretations* matter? And to what extend do global interpretations of a scene propagate downwards to the specifics? How fast are these transitions?
How do images that represent semantically distinguishable forms inhibit the existence of contradictory representations with semantically opposed qualities? At what speed do these inhibitions propagate in the visual field? (again, the question focuses on the experience rather than on the neural substrate or any other specific preferred or assumed substrate besides qualia).
All of these questions can be formulated in very rigorous ways. And then tested empirically with psychophysics. We can start to ask these questions and to find answers. And thus, to characterize the computational characteristics of consciousness as such.
This work will certainly be synergistic with the current approaches. No doubt. But to optimize the balance of minds on each part to have the most synergistic mix, more persons could shift to the study of consciousness as such. That’s why this is the current comparatively most important matter.
Why should we care about the computational characteristics of consciousness?
Because there is a comparative advantage to consciousness as a computing substrate, there must be applications in which consciousness is the single most efficient computing medium! That should motivate any practical-minded person. But, what should be even unsaid since how obvious it is: Consciousness is also the very source of what is valuable! By understanding and becoming capable of engineering it, we could finally produce value itself directly. Any utilitarian should be extremely excited about this possibility.

What does comparatively matter in 2015?


Suffering: Not what your sober mind tells you

“I believe that most of us tend to underrate the evilness of suffering. The reason is that it is difficult for us, when not actually suffering, to recollect what suffering really is. We employ numerous psychological mechanisms to conceal from our consciousness the true nature or meaning of suffering, to falsify and deny it. We do this without renouncing the word, however. The word comes to designate, in our minds, only a faint copy or superficial image of the real thing; but having forgotten what the original is, we mistake it in the copy. We ascribe to “suffering” a certain gravity of evil; but it is slight compared to what we would ascribe to suffering itself, if we could only recall its true meaning.

(…)
The falsification of suffering is everywhere — in movies, in poetry, in novels, on the nightly news. Accounts of disaster routinely veer from a discussion of the agony and plight of the victims (which quickly becomes tiresome) to the description of some moving act of kindness or bravery. Often it is these descriptions that affect us the most and that provoke the greatest outburst of emotion. These are the images we often take away and that become our image of “suffering.” Suffering comes to be closely associated with stirring images of hope in adversity, acts of moral heroism and touching kindness, gestures of human dignity, sentiments of noble sympathy and tremulous concern, the comfort and consolation of tears. It turns into something beautiful. It becomes poetry. People begin to refer to “sublime suffering.” Suffering, in other words, becomes just exactly what it is not.”
– “Suffering and Moral Responsiblity” by Jamie Mayerfeld.


Reconciling memetics and religion.

Nowadays the conceptualization of the evolution of human thought as the competition between self-replicating memes (memetics) tends to be brought up in arguments against the reliability of mainstream belief systems. Richard Dawkins famously argued that just as there can be selfish genes that don’t benefit their hosts and yet thrive at self-replicating, there are plenty of cases in which memes harmful to the individual who holds them replicate successfully.
This observation is usually used as an argument against religious doctrine for two reasons. First, memetics would predict the appearance of emotionally satisfying pseudo-explanations for the things we don’t understand, such as the nature of reality and what happens after death. And second, these explanations would not in any way have to reflect true facts; in fact, truth may have little to do with a meme’s success at self-replicating. Thus, religions will probably proclaim ideas that makes them self-replicate whether or not the claims made are true.
Thus memetics may be capable of (1) explaining the existence of religion and (2) dismissing major religious claims as mere strategies for self-replication (e.g. “if you don’t believe in God you will go to Hell!”). I personally know several persons who either became atheist or at least much more skeptical of religious prescriptions after considering memetics deeply.
As far as I know neither the Vatican nor any major religious promoter has addressed successfully this new and fascinating source of skepticism.
All that is old news. Here is the innovation: It occurs to me that memetics can actually be used to defend major religions in a grounded way. See, the dumb rhetorical move from a religious point of view, which is also the most tempting and commonly made, is to attack memetics itself. Say, by spousing romantic and even fanatical views about the nature of the evolution of ideas, one can pretend that the laws of self-reproduction break down when we are talking about minds and the mystical. Or worse, proclaim that such a view makes us look like robots hijacked by memes to fulfill their purpose, and that for such a reason it cannot be the case (an instance of “too ugly to be true”).
There is, however, a rational reply that religious authorities could give, if they actually did the harder move: Embrace memetics instead of dismissing it. You see, over time we can indeed predict that any ideology will get better and better at self-replicating. Appeal to emotion may even take over rational and evidence-based argumentation. One could in principle claim that these features will be observed in any religion or ideology, specially if it has endured hundreds of years of cultural evolution.
Now here is the twist:
It may be *precisely* because of memetic evolution that the true word of God has been corrupted. We might have had it all explained to us in the past. God could have well given us an excellent evidence-based and rational explanation about what happens after death, morality and what we should do to be good people.
And yet, in spite of God’s good intentions, cultural evolution corrupted his message over time. They could say: The reason why my religion promotes many ethically questionable behaviors is not because it didn’t have a Godly seed. It is because with time, more emotionally-appealing versions of the religion gradually out-competed the original Truth. Yet, we are still connected to that seed, and our labor is to reconstruct the original message.

Reconciling memetics and religion.


The Reality of Basement Reality

Are there deep, mistaken underlying background assumptions about the nature of reality that support our empirical sciences?
Here is a thought: I was talking to someone about qualia and causality when it dawned on me that an unexamined background assumption I had was the following.
“There is a basement reality.”
Quarks may ultimately break down into further components, but we are working under the assumption that there is a deeper, smaller set of actual building blocks. Even if you don’t postulate discrete building blocks, the background assumption of “a basement reality” is still present in the idea that the entire physical universe can be described in terms of fields and wavefunctions.
But couldn’t this be fundamentally mistaken? How? Here is a ridiculous example that drives the point home: Imagine that inside each fundamental particle you encounter a kind of miniature black hole, within which the entire universe is enclosed. The microscopic properties of those particles are the result of the angular disposition of the entire universe within it relative to the nearby particles. I don’t mean that “there is another universe inside it.” The idea here is that “inside each fundamental particle you literally, actually find the same universe within which the particle is supposedly contained.”
I say “supposedly contained” because this particular model would make it indeterminate whether the particles are in the universe or the universe is in the particles. In fact, neither description would be true, and you’d see a fundamental breakdown of the background assumption. You couldn’t reduce the behavior of any part of the universe to the behavior of underlying mechanisms.
How could this universe evolve? After all there is only so many possible self-consistent “solutions” to this fractal self-contained view of the universe. Things like that exist in math: The smooth morphing between nearby Julia sets. Each one of them is an infinitely intricate universe on its own, and yet you can find an arbitrarily similar set that is itself also fractal and infinitely intricate. You see sudden structures appear out of nowhere (quantum mechanics anyone?) for the simple reason that those things complete the fractal.
Are we a morphing fractal with no ground and no roof?
Implausible as it may seem, at least this view would make the question “why is there something rather than nothing” a *little* bit less mysterious. There is something ’cause it approximates nothing by not being based on anything ultimately real. A big mirage of nothing.

The Reality of Basement Reality


The future of love

Assume the neurological signature of bliss was found in a few years from now.
The natural things happen: We all end up consuming the technology whether it is commercialized, open sourced, distributed by the government or simply pirated and distributed in black markets.
Love counseling becomes love engineering within 30 years.

The future of love


And that’s why we can and cannot have nice things

Nothing is good or bad, but the encephalization of phenomenal valence via afferent neural connections from our limbic system’s hedonic hot spots makes it so.


Breaking the Thought Barrier: Ethics of Brain Computer Interfaces in the workplace

For the final project of CS181, Ethics in computing at Stanford, my team and I built this website about the ethics of BCIs in the workplace.
http://stanford.edu/~mcsforza/breaking-the-thought-barrier
It turns out that there are policy vacuums on this issue. Namely, we do not know how to deal with the data collected by BCIs that enhance productivity in the workplace. After all, they could reveal things such as drug use and mental health status. We analyzed these ethical concerns from a transhumanist point of view – and argued, too, that a transhumanist framework is necessary and appropriate to analyze emerging technologies such as this one.


Consciousness engineering!

David Pearce joined me at Stanford to discuss the future of consciousness in the “Age of Reason” panel on that very topic.

Consciousness engineering!


How bad does it get?

“Let’s distinguish the worst that can happen if transhumanists succeed in our objectives from the worst that can happen if we fail. A world without the biology of involuntary aging or involuntary suffering may still be sub-optimal by some criteria. But compared to the horrors of Darwinian life, even a substandard utopia can sound like Heaven.”
– David Pearce

How bad does it get?


God in Buddhism

Check this out.
Several interesting points.
1) The Judeo-Christian God of the Old Testament fits the description of Brahman, the highest entity in charge of governing our sphere of reality. But in contrast to theistic traditions, this being is not described as a “creator God.” Instead, this entity seems to be just another entity in the infinite sea of reality. He just happens to hold the power here, right now, over us, for simple causal reasons (due to its past good karma). Eventually he will die. Worse, this entity is profoundly deluded. He thinks that he is God, the supreme creator of everything. Sir Charles Eliot explains:
“There comes a time when this world system passes away and then certain beings are reborn in the “World of Radiance” and remain there a long time. Sooner or later, the world system begins to evolve again and the palace of Brahma appears, but it is empty. Then some being whose time is up falls from the “World of Radiance” and comes to life in the palace and remains there alone. At last he wishes for company, and it so happens that other beings whose time is up fall from the “World of Radiance” and join him. And the first being thinks that he is Great Brahma, the Creator, because when he felt lonely and wished for companions other beings appeared. And the other beings accept this view. And at last one of Brahma’s retinue falls from that state and is born in the human world and, if he can remember his previous birth, he reflects that he is transitory but that Brahma still remains and from this he draws the erroneous conclusion that Brahma is eternal.”
2) Even though Buddhist schools have disagreements on whether “Primordial Buddhas” exist, their nature, and their status as ‘the ground of all being’, one thing seems to be agreed upon: The universe has no beginning; thus no entity can be described as the primordial creator of the universe. As an example of the kind of arguments given for the impossibility of such being, here is a 7th century dialogue by the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, as he critiques the Indian doctrine of the great Eternal Self:
“According to one doctrine, there is a great, self-existent deity whose substance is real and who is all-pervading, eternal, and the producer of all phenomena. This doctrine is unreasonable. If something produces something, it is not eternal, the non-eternal is not all-pervading, and what is not all-pervading is not real. If the deity’s substance is all-pervading and eternal, it must contain all powers and be able to produce all phenomena everywhere, at all times, and simultaneously. If he produces phenomena when a desire arises, or according to conditions, this contradicts the doctrine of a single cause. Or else, desires and conditions would arise spontaneously since the cause is eternal. Other doctrines claim that there is a great Brahma, a Time, a Space, a Starting Point, a Nature, an Ether, a Self, etc., that is eternal and really exists, is endowed with all powers, and is able to produce all phenomena. We refute all these in the same way we did the concept of the Great Lord.”
In brief, the very act of creating something is itself a mark of impermanence. That’s an interesting take on theology I’d never heard before. This, however, does not preclude an eternal God that exists in Plato’s world of forms, does it? It just means such God is causally ineffective. Perhaps the power of God come from logical implication rather than causation. I.e. God matters, not because He can do anything to us, but because his existence implies certain facts that are causally relevant for our life. Or not.
3) I find the idea of Bodhisattvas and Primordial Buddhas to resonate a lot with my core ethical views. Unlike the Gods of other traditions, these Gods are genuine negative utilitarians who would rather “cancel existence” than allow a mouse to suffer a heat stroke (to give a random example).
Who knew Great Negative Utilitarian entities were so highly revered in this worlds? It is almost unbelievable once you consider the fascination with Hell and damnation that many people have in this society.

God in Buddhism


Practical metaphysics

If Rudolph Steiner’s account of the life of the soul after death is correct, then there would be a good reason to avoid hedonic recalibration above the proverbial ‘hedonic zero.’
He claims that between rebirths, a period that will last for at least a few months, the soul experiences a tremendous sense of loss and craving for the body it once had. Worse, whatever things the person used to enjoy, look forward to, or be addicted to in life, will be things the soul will now intensely crave.

If such craving does not subside enough after a certain number of days, the soul will look around desperately to find a place where reincarnating might allow it to satisfy its cravings. The only way to be reborn in a higher plane is to either forgone those cravings or, well, be super-mindful as you die.
I don’t know what the probability of this is. But it does comes to bear on matters of policy. If we were to modify our brains to be in a perpetual state of hedonic bliss, the cravings of the soul upon death would be much worse and thus the fate at the point of reincarnation would be disastrous.
If it so happens that Steiner is right about the causal web that unites the body and the soul, and the rules the determine reincarnation, then we would have to reconsider the methods used to achieve the Abolitionist Project. The philosophical, ethical and normative justifications for carrying out the Abolitionist Project would still hold, no problem. But it would add an extra layer of complexity and unintended consequences to our actions.
Perhaps in that case the project should stop once we achieve sustainable hedonic zero, rather than going after higher and higher levels of bliss.
Alternatively, as Steiner believes, some forms of bliss (specifically the encompassing loving-kindness) may not cause craving after death. In that case, developing technologies that enable those kinds of experiences and inhibit the mundane craving-prone forms of pleasure might be the way to go.
What I am pointing out here is that the particular *details* of the ultimate solution to the mind-body problem, and the causal web within which this interaction takes place, can have important policy consequences.
In that case, allocating more resources to the *investigation* of this relationship is paramount before committing ourselves to particular courses of action.
The focus on cultivating a universal desire to relieve all sentients from the burden of their suffering, though, shall remain immutable for the rest of eternity. Amen.

Practical metaphysics


Little known fun fact

89% of all superstitions, such as the belief that “crossing a black cat brings bad luck,” are completely false.
The other 11% were programmed into the fabric of reality by Isaac Newton’s ghost to mess up with scientists.

Little known fun fact


Crossing borders

No action required. Just appreciation. Of this course description. I find it poetic and sublime, like a conceptual flower in the current zeitgeist:
“ASNAMST 144: Transforming Self and Systems: Crossing Borders of Race, Nation, Gender, Sexuality, and Class (CSRE 144, FEMGEN 144X)
“Exploration of crossing borders within ourselves, and between us and them, based on a belief that understanding the self leads to understanding others. How personal identity struggles have meaning beyond the individual, how self healing can lead to community healing, how the personal is political, and how artistic self expression based in self understanding can address social issues. The tensions of victimization and agency, contemplation and action, humanities and science, embracing knowledge that comes from the heart as well as the mind. Studies are founded in synergistic consciousness as movement toward meaning, balance, connectedness, and wholeness. Engaging these questions through group process, journaling, reading, drama, creative writing, and storytelling. Study is academic and self-reflective, with an emphasis on developing and presenting creative works in various media that express identity development across borders.
“Terms: Aut | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: WAY-CE, WAY-ED | Grading: Letter or Credit/No Credit
“Instructors: Murphy-Shigematsu, S. (PI)
Schedule for ASNAMST 144”

Crossing borders


A simple mystical explanation

Humans live near true hells but only wander to their edges. We may feel awful and sick sometimes but we rarely experience the sustained suffering that many other animals do.
I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that if we have a mystical mission in this planet is to save the animals. We are the only beings capable of thought in this planet, and the ability to imagine better futures and experiences that are actually realizable.
So imagine the following scenario: Higher beings are too perfect to be capable of entering this domain of existence. They are also too diffuse and lack the material density that we have. How would they rescue the beings stuck in the horrors of Darwinian life? Perhaps by communicating and shaping, gradually (as fast as possible!), the minds of human beings.
The invasion of the divine starts with making humans attracted to particular forms of being that are selected for their long term benefits to consciousness. Thus some people acquire preferences aligned to what they consider beautiful and that beauty always refers to configurations of qualia that incite good attributes (in the causal sense of generally producing better results).
Particularly well developed moral beings recognize the pain and suffering in other species as well. This only requires self honesty and intellectual curiosity. But then what? Ability to generalize and solve inconsistencies. All of those attributes are equally liked by the Gods.
They lead, to an unconditional compassion towards all suffering beings (boring!) and the systematic (however strange) application of rationality principles to how to go about enacting those values! I.e. The Abolitionist Project no less.

A simple mystical explanation