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Jurily comments on The Growth of My Pessimism: Transhumanism, Immortalism, Effective Altruism. - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: diegocaleiro 28 November 2015 11:07AM

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Comment author: Jurily 30 November 2015 05:43:32PM 1 point [-]

Our technologies can’t and won’t for a while lead our minds to peaks anywhere near the peaks we found by simply introducing weirdly shaped molecules into our brains. The strangeness of Salvia, the beauty of LSD, the love of MDMA are orders and orders of magnitude beyond what we know how to change from an engineering perspective.

The technology does exist. In hypnosis, we do party tricks including the effects of the weirdly shaped molecules. Think about this redirect. We do lucid dreaming. We do all the cool stuff from eastern meditations and some that probably haven't been done before ("ultra-height"). We can do everything the human mind is capable of experiencing. We produce usable social/dating/relationship advice, sports training, sales training, therapy, anything that involves using your brain better. We can redesign our own personality.

It sounds like magic, but it's just sufficiently advanced. When installing a Death Star power core in the root chakra does exactly what I expect, the only observation of objective reality is that the brain figured out what I'm trying to do and made it happen somehow. It could be a fun research topic to find out the neurology of different techniques, but the current dominant scientific theory says hypnosis is a form of placebo.

Comment author: Lumifer 30 November 2015 05:55:05PM * 3 points [-]

We can do everything the human mind is capable of experiencing.

That sounds like a wildly overreaching claim. We can do that now / in the near future? I don't think so.

When installing a Death Star power core in the root chakra does exactly what I expect

/blinks. What do you expect installing a Death Star power core in the root chakra to do?

(will it let you shoot death rays out of your ass?)

Comment author: ChristianKl 03 December 2015 12:19:56AM * 0 points [-]

That sounds like a wildly overreaching claim. We can do that now / in the near future? I don't think so.

At a local NLP seminar everything was fun, while they reinduced drug experiences. They went on building and increase the intensity. After a while the intensity reached the point that a person dropped unconscious and stayed that way for 10 minutes and the fun was over.

To me it seems possible to raise the intensity of experiences via hypnosis very far.

Comment author: Jurily 01 December 2015 10:58:46AM 0 points [-]

That sounds like a wildly overreaching claim. We can do that now / in the near future? I don't think so.

Getting people drunk/high is one of the classics of stage hypnosis. What steps have you taken to observe reality before reaching that conclusion?

/blinks. What do you expect installing a Death Star power core in the root chakra to do?

Establish and maintain a higher baseline of subjective well-being. People already have concepts like "chi" or "mental energy"; a generator produces more energy; and the "root chakra" is "where energy enters the body". I know that last one because I decided it sounds good.

These concepts are "real" in the same sense as a programming language. There is no inheritance in the transistors, but you can pretend as long as the compiler does the right thing with your code. Apparently the human brain is intelligent enough that we can simply make shit up.

Comment author: Lumifer 01 December 2015 04:15:48PM 2 points [-]

we can simply make shit up

Ah, well, good luck with that.

Comment author: Jurily comment score below threshold [+] (8 children)

Comment author: Lumifer 02 December 2015 01:19:01AM 3 points [-]

You haven't provided any theory. You made incoherent noises about chi, chakras, stuffing a Death Star power core up someone's ass, and making shit up.

Comment author: Jurily 02 December 2015 09:00:27PM 1 point [-]

I've linked a stage hypnotist training class and made testable predictions you find obviously false. It's meaningless to discuss smartphone design until you've shown the willingness to press the power button and see what happens.

Comment author: polymathwannabe 02 December 2015 12:04:02AM * 2 points [-]

(Note to future readers: as of the time of writing this post, Lumifer's post had on net balance 1 single upvote, and it came from me.)

@Jurily: nowhere did your post say or even imply that "the human brain is intelligent," and this post doesn't help either. What you described was a very ambitious project of rewriting the brain at will with hypnosis, which under the current understanding of psychology is a very extraordinary claim, especially considering the mystical-sounding jargon you threw in. So skepticism is more than justified.

Comment author: Jurily 02 December 2015 10:41:45PM 0 points [-]

When physicists have two experiments proving two mutually exclusive theories, they come up with a theory that explains both, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, and then redesign their methodology to test the new predictions. Newtonian physics is still accurate enough to explain a soccer game, reality hasn't changed when GR explained the quirks.

Under the current "understanding" of psychology, people want to fuck their parents at age 3 and depression is an "illness" even though 150 years of research hasn't demonstrated the cause or a cure. Their "treatments" look to me like trying to close a Chrome tab by radiating the box while I can produce permanent results just by telling people to basically calm down and stop being stupid after they have already given up on "evidence-based therapy". What does it mean when "PTSD" is frequently "misdiagnosed" as "ADHD" and neither has a cure? What does it mean when we literally have self-driving cars before a professor of psychology comes up with a way to scare people into not texting on the road to save their lives?

Until psychology adopts a research methodology strong enough to conclude the Oedipus complex has always been bullshit or at least develop the idea that their theories are supposed to explain placebo as part of observed reality, it is not a field of science. They're just priests of the Church of the Published Article.

Be a skeptic, just don't think that means you're supposed to stick your fingers in your ear and chant "pseudoscience" until men stop going into labour on stage just because someone told them to. If nothing else, at least give me the courtesy of assuming for five seconds that I might have some sane reason to come to a den of rationalists and profess my crackpot beliefs.

Comment author: polymathwannabe 02 December 2015 11:23:49PM 0 points [-]

Your impression of what psychologists believe is outdated. Today's psychologists already know that Freudian psychoanalysis doesn't work. It's been years since it was part of the standard understanding of psychology. And the placebo effect is already accounted for in every serious randomized trial.

Your implication that depression is not a real thing needs to be explained in more detail, especially with such a kilometer-tall red flag as your use of square quotes for evidence-based medicine.

So, what's your evidence that stage hypnosis is a viable therapy?

Comment author: Jurily 03 December 2015 01:29:23PM 1 point [-]

Your impression of what psychologists believe is outdated. Today's psychologists already know that Freudian psychoanalysis doesn't work. It's been years since it was part of the standard understanding of psychology.

That's nice, but what about the axiom of medicine, when was that examined? How did they prove the idea that statistics is an effective research method for neural networks of 10^14 synapses trained on unique input exhibiting mostly unique symptoms?

And the placebo effect is already accounted for in every serious randomized trial.

Yes, I applaud their very effective ways to completely ignore it. Where's the research on producing better and permanent placebo? Where are the results? Don't you think that's in scope for a field called psychology? If not, who should be researching it? In what way is "placebo" not a thought-stopper for psychology?

Your implication that depression is not a real thing needs to be explained in more detail, especially with such a kilometer-tall red flag as your use of square quotes for evidence-based medicine.

Depression is a real thing, it's just not a hardware problem. They should be doing tech support, not medicine. Half of NLP is basically trying to find out what they see on the screen, and they still get better results. Psychology needs to qualify their methods as "evidence-based" to distinguish it from "result-based".

If you think medicine is a better fit for the human brain than a computing metaphor, feel free to demonstrate the existence of a mental immune system.

So, what's your evidence that stage hypnosis is a viable therapy?

I mention stage hypnotists a lot because they need to make it blatantly obvious that something is happening. They optimize for entertainment, not therapy. You can observe their results on Youtube.

For therapy, my evidence is Mark Cunningham's work. When he does an erotic hypnosis demo on a subject with anorgasmia, you can tell she was telling the truth because the session lasts about 20 minutes longer than usual. The results are also blatantly obvious. Look for Adina in his Renegade Hypnotist Project. It's up on TPB, along with a bunch of his other stuff. Some of his other demos are also up on Youtube.

Here is Richard Bandler dealing with a schizophrenic. He's also using hypnosis everywhere he goes, also up on TPB.

You will not find one person who has done erotic hypnosis on either side of the chair who believes it possible to hang on to anything diagnosed as depression after ten orgasms in half an hour. One.

Comment author: polymathwannabe 03 December 2015 04:06:46PM -1 points [-]

How did they prove the idea that statistics is an effective research method

The intimidating complexity of the brain doesn't turn it into a strange, otherworldly realm where the same boring laws of physics somehow cease to apply.

Where's the research on producing better and permanent placebo?

Your idea of what a placebo does is very confused. A placebo is not a backdoor fix to reboot the brain with a secret magic word. A placebo is anything that is physically ineffectual but resembles actual therapy, and the only reason why it's still a necessary evil in research is because it gives a standard of comparison to ascertain how much of the effect of an actual treatment was due to mere suggestion. It is (outside of rare scenarios where a doctor is in an extremely precarious situation with no viable therapy at hand) the epitome of unethical to prescribe a placebo.

Depression is a real thing, it's just not a hardware problem.

Unless you're a dualist, every mental disorder is a hardware problem. There's simply no other place where things can happen.

If you think medicine is a better fit for the human brain than a computing metaphor

Don't put words in my mouth. I've never spoken against the computing metaphor.

You can observe their results on Youtube.

I can also observe faith healing and exorcisms on YouTube. Show me large-scale, randomized, controlled trials published in peer-reviewed journals.

You will not find one person [...] to hang on to anything diagnosed as depression after ten orgasms in half an hour.

Now you're making a testable claim. You're saying lots of orgasms cure depression. What's the scientific evidence?

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Jurily comments on The Growth of My Pessimism: Transhumanism, Immortalism, Effective Altruism. - Less Wrong Discussion

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