This suggests something profound about metaphysics itself: Our basic intuitions about what's fundamental to reality (whether materialist OR idealist) might be more about human neural architecture than about ultimate reality. It's like a TV malfunctioning in a way that produces the message "TV isn't real, only signals are real!"

In meditation, this is the fundamental insight, the so called non-dual view. Neither are you the fundamental non-self nor are you the specific self that you yourself believe in, you're neither, they're all empty views, yet that view in itself is also empty. For that view comes from the co-creation of reality from your own perspective yet why should that be fundamental?

Emptiness is empty and so can't be true and you just kind of fall down into this realization of there being only circular or arbitrary properties of experience. Self and non-self are just as true and living from this experience is wonderfully freeing. 

If you view your self as a nested hierarchical controller and you see through it then you believe that you can't be it and so you therefore cling onto what is next most apparent, that you're the entire universe but that has to be false as well! 

This is explored in the later parts of the book seeing that frees by rob burbea if anyone's interested. 

There's a plausible mechanistic explanation: Psychedelics disrupt the Default Mode Network and adjusting a bunch of other neural parameters. When these break down, the experience of physical reality (your predictive processing simulation) gets fuzzy and malleable while consciousness remains vivid and present. This creates a powerful intuition that consciousness must be more fundamental than matter. Conscious experience is more fundamental/stable than perception of the material world, which many people conflate with the material world itself.

I think something like a similar model here is that it disrupts the controller and so you're left with sensory input instead without a controller and so you can only be sensory input? I'm uncertain of how you use the word consciousness here do you mean our blob of sensory experience or something else?

I sent the following offer (lightly edited) to discuss metaphysics to plex. I extend the same to anyone else.^[1]

(Note: I don't do psychedelics or participate in the mentioned communities^[2], and I'm deeply suspicious of intuitions/deep-human-default-assumptions. I notice unquestioned intuitions across views on this, and the primary thing I'd like to do in discussing is try to get the other to see theirs.)

Hi, I saw [this shortform] by you

Wondering if you'd want to discuss metaphysics itself / let me socratic-question^[3] you. I lean towards the view that "metaphysics is extra-mathematical; it contains non-mathematical-objects, such as phenomenal qualia" but I'd like to mostly see if I can socratic-question you into noticing incoherence. I'm too uncertain about the true metaphysics to put forth a totalizing theory.

It might help if you've read this post first.

My starting questions:

1. Do you believe phenomenal qualia exist? If you do, are they mathematical objects? If you don't, can you watch this short video on a thought experiment?

   (Commentary: someone in the comments of the linked post told me that video was what changed their position from 'camp 1' (~illusionist, e.g. "qualia is an intuition from evolution") to 'camp 2' ("qualia is metaphysically fundamental"))

2. You mentioned 'matter' and 'math' as candidates for 'fundamental to reality'. My question depends on which is your view.

   1. If you believe matter is fundamental, what do you mean by matter; how does it differ from math?

      (Commentary: "matter" seems like an intuitive concept; one has an intuition that reality is "made of something", and calls that "thing" (undefined) "matter", and refers to "matter" without knowing "what it is" (also undefined); there being a word for this intuition prevents them from noticing their lack of knowledge, or the circular self-reference between "matter" and "what the world is made of")

   2. If you believe math is fundamental, what distinguishes this particular mathematical universe from other ones; what qualifies this world as "real", if anything; what 'breathes fire into the equations and creates a world for them to describe'?

      (Commentary: one self-consistent position answers "nothing" - that this world is just one of the infinitely many possible mathematical functions / programs. That 'real' secretly means 'the program(s?) we are part of'. Though I observe this position to be rare; most have a strong intuition that there is something which "makes reality real".)

   3. If you believe math is fundamental, what is math?^[4]

1. ^{^}

   Though I'll likely lose interest if it seems like we're talking past each other / won't resolve any cruxy disagreements.

2. ^{^}

   (except arguably the qualia research institute's discord server, which might count because it has psychedelics users in it)

3. ^{^}

   (Questioning with the goal of causing the questioned one to notice specific assumptions or intuitions to their beliefs, as a result of trying to generate a coherent answer)

4. ^{^}

   From an unposted text:

   The paradox of recursive explanation applies to metaphysics too

   In Explain/Worship/Ignore (~500 words), Eliezer describes an apparent paradox: if you ask for some physical phenomena to be explained (shown to have a more fundamental cause), then ask the same of the explanation, and so on, the only conceivable outcomes seem paradoxical: infinite recurse, circular self-reference, or a 'special' first cause that does not itself need to be explained.

   This is sometimes called the paradox of why. It's usually applied to physics; this text applies it to logic/math-structure and metaphysics/ontology too. In short, you can continually ask "but what is x" for any aspect of logic or ontology.

   Here's a hypothetical Socratic dialogue.

   Author: "What is reality?"

   Interlocutor: "Reality is <complete description of [very large mathematical structure that perfectly reflects the behavior of the universe]>."

   Author: "Let's suppose that is true. But this 'math' you just used; what is it?"

   Interlocutor: "Mathematics is a program which assigns, based on a few simple rules, 'T' or 'F' to inputs formatted in a certain way."

   Author: "I think you just moved the hard part of the question to be one question away: What is a program?"

   Interlocutor: "Hmm. I can't define a program in terms of math, because I just did the reverse. Wikipedia says a program is 'a sequence of instructions for a computer to execute'. If I just wrote that, Author would ask what it means for a computer to execute an instruction. What else could I write?

   A computer is a part of physics arranged into a localized structure, and for this structure to 'execute an instruction' is for physical law to flow through (operate on, apply to) it, such that the structure's observed behavior matches that of a simpler-than-physics abstract system for transforming inputs to outputs. Unfortunately, I've already defined physics in terms of math, so defining a program in terms of physics would be circular. I think I'm at a dead end."

   Author: "Do you want to revise one of your previous definitions?"

   Interlocutor: "Maybe I could define math as some more fundamental thing instead of as a certain kind of program. But I just failed to find such a more fundamental thing for 'program'. Let's check Wikipedia again...

   WP:Mathematics: 'Mathematics involves the description and manipulation of abstract objects that consist of either abstractions from nature or—in modern mathematics—purely abstract entities that are stipulated to have certain properties, called axioms'

   WP:Mathematical_Object 'Typically, a mathematical object can be a value that can be assigned to a symbol, and therefore can be involved in formulas. Commonly encountered mathematical objects include numbers, expressions, shapes, functions, and sets.'

   "I can't use the 'abstractions from nature' part, because I've already defined nature to be mathematical, so that would be circular. Saying math is made of numbers, expressions, symbols, etc, isn't helpful either, though; Author will just ask what those are, metaphysically. Okay, I concede for now, though maybe a commenter will propose such a more-fundamental-thing that I'm not aware of, though it would invite the same question."

   [End of dialogue]

These datapoints just feel like the result of random fluctuations. Both Writer and Eliezer mostly drove people to participate on the LK-99 stuff where lots of people were confidently wrong. In-general you can see that basically all the top referrers have negative income: 

Among the top 10, Eliezer and Writer are somewhat better than the average (and yaboi is a huge outlier, which my guess is would be explained by them doing something quite different than the other people). 

Did you?

Can't you do this as polls in a single comment?