[Recommendation] Steven Universe & cryonics
I've been watching Steven Universe with my fiancee (a children's cartoon on Cartoon Network by Rebecca Sugar), and it wasn't until I got to Season 3 that I realized there's been a cryonics metaphor running in the background since the very first episode. If you want to introduce your kids to the idea of cryonics, this series seems like a spectacularly good way to do it.
If you don't want any spoilers, just go watch it, then come back.
Otherwise, here's the metaphor I'm seeing, and why it's great:
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In the very first episode, we find out that the main characters are a group called the Crystal Gems, who fight 'gem monsters'. When they defeat a monster, a gem is left behind, which they lock in a bubble-forcefield and store in their headquarters.
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One of the Crystal Gems is injured in a training accident, and we find out that their bodies are just projections; each Crystal Gem has a gem located somewhere on their body, which contains their minds. So long as their gem isn't damaged, they can project a new body after some time to recover. So we already have the insight that minds and bodies are separate.
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This is driven home by a second episode where one of the Crystal Gems has their crystal cracked; this is actually dangerous to their mind, not just body, and is treated as a dire emergency instead of merely an inconvenience.
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Then we eventually find out that the gem monsters are actually corrupted members of the same species as the Crystal Gems. They are 'bubbled' and stored in the temple in hopes of eventually restoring them to sanity and their previous forms.
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An attempt is made to cure one of the monsters, which doesn't fully succeed, but at least restores them to sanity. This allows them to remain unbubbled and to be reunited with their old comrades (who are also corrupted). This was the episode where I finally made the connection to cryonics.
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The Crystal Gems are also revealed to be over 5000 years old, and effectively immortal. They don't make a big deal out of this; for them, this is totally normal.
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This also implies that they've made no progress in curing the gem monsters in 5000 years, but that doesn't stop them from preserving them anyway.
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Finally, a secret weapon is revealed which is capable of directly shattering gems (thus killing the target permanently), but the use of it is rejected as unethical.
So, all in all, you have a series where when someone is hurt or sick in a way that you can't help, you preserve their mind in a safe way until you can figure out a way to help them. Even your worst enemy deserves no less.
Also, Steven Universe has an entire episode devoted to mindfulness meditation.
Personal Notes On Productivity (A categorization of various resources)
For each topic, I’ve curated a few links that I’ve found to be pretty high quality.
- Meta:(Epiphany Addiction, Reversing Advice, Excellence Porn)
- @Learning:
- Success People: (Mastery),(ChoosingTopics: Osci,PG)
- Thinking: (Ikigai, Stoicism, Rationality)
- HabitChange: (!ShootDog)
- Productivity.Principles/Energy/Relaxation:(FullEngagement, ArtOfLearning)
- Productivity.Systems/Hacks: (Autofocus, GTD/ZTD, EatFrog),(Scott Young)
- Depression/Anxiety:
- Social:
- Meditation
Full List: https://workflowy.com/s/zUTEaY0ZcJ
I'd like feedback on:
- What other categories/links would you include (I'm sure there's lots of interesting stuff I'm missing.)? What do you think of the categorization ("Thinking" is a pretty large category.)?
- Whether you think I should make cross-posts about sub-topics here. The main benefit of making more cross posts is that the discussion/comments would be more focused on those topics. In particular, I think that looking at SuccessfulPeople.Startups, SuccessfulPeople.Science, and the Meditation document are the most original parts of this post.
- SuccessfulPeople.Startups contains a categorization of some of Paul Graham's essays (e.g. Having ideas, fund-raising, executing, etc).
- The SuccessfulPeople.Science link contains a separate categorization of advice specifically for scientists (e.g. Picking ideas, the importance of being persistent, the importance of reading widely, etc).
- The meditation document lists a few high quality meditation resources that I've found (and I've read ~10 books on meditation. Most of it is crap. Some of the stuff I list is orders of magnitude better than the median meditation book I've read.).
- Whatever seems salient to you.
Training Reflective Attention
Crossposted at Agenty Duck
And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry's art to notice that tiny note, but he was distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it. —HPMOR, Ch. 3
A rationalist’s art is most distant when it is most needed. Why is that?
When I am very angry with my romantic partner, what I feel is anger. I don’t feel the futility of throwing a tantrum, or the availability of other options like honest communication, or freewriting, or taking a deep breath. My attention is so narrowly focused on the object of my anger that I’m likely not even aware that I’m angry, let alone that my anger might be blinding me to my art.
When her skills are most needed, a rationalist is lost in an unskillful state of mind. She doesn’t recognize that it’s happening, and she doesn’t remember that she has prepared for it by learning and practicing appropriate techniques.
I've designed and exercise that trains a skill I call reflective attention, and some call mindfulness. For me, it serves as an anchor in a stormy mind, or as a compass pointing always toward a mental state where my art is close at hand.
Noticing that I am lost in an unskillful state of mind is a separate skill. But when I do happen to notice—when I feel that small, small note of confusion—reflective attention helps me find my way back. Instead of churning out even more pointless things to yell at my partner, it allows me to say, “I am angry. I feel an impulse to yell. I notice my mind returning over and over to the memory that makes me more angry. I’m finding it hard to concentrate. I am distracted. I have a vague impression that I have prepared for this.” And awareness of that final thought allows me to ask, “What have I trained myself to do when I feel this way?”
The goal of the following exercise is to practice entering reflective attention.
It begins with an instruction to think of nothing. When you monitor yourself to make sure you’re not having any thoughts, your attention ends up directed toward the beginnings of thoughts. Since the contents of consciousness are always changing, maintaining focus on the beginnings of thoughts prevents you from engaging for an extended period with any particular thought. It prevents you from getting “lost in thought”, or keeping attention focused on a thought without awareness of doing so. The point is not actually to be successful at thinking nothing, as that is impossible while conscious, but to notice what happens when you try.
Keeping your focus on the constant changes in your stream of consciousness brings attention to your experience of awareness itself. Awareness of awareness is the anchor for attention. It lets you keep your bearings when you’d otherwise be carried away by a current of thought or emotion.
Once you’re so familiar with the feeling of reflection that creating it is a primitive action, you can forget the introductory part, and jump straight to reflective attention whenever it occurs to you to do so.
This will probably take around five minutes, but you can do it for much longer if you want to.
Notice what your mind is doing right now. One thing it’s doing is experiencing sensations of black and white as you read. What else are you experiencing? Are there words in your inner monologue? Are there emotions of any kind?
Spend about thirty seconds trying not to think anything. When thirty seconds is up, stop trying not to think, and read on.
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What’s happening in your mind is constantly changing. Even when you were trying not to think, you probably noticed many times when the stillness would shift and some new thought would begin to emerge in conscious awareness.
Turn your attention to those changes. When a new thought emerges in consciousness, see if you can notice the exact moment when it happens, becoming aware of what it feels like for that particular change to take place.
If it helps at first, you can narrate your stream of consciousness in words: “Now I’m seeing the blue of the wall, now I’m hearing the sound of a car, now I’m feeling cold, now I’m curious what time it is…” You’ll probably find that you can’t narrate anywhere near quickly enough, in part because thoughts can happen in parallel, while speech is serial. Once narrating starts to become frustrating, stop slowing yourself down with words, and just silently observe your thoughts as they occur.
If you’re finding this overwhelming because there are too many thoughts, narrow your focus down to just your breathing, and try to precisely identify the experience of an exhale ending and an inhale beginning, of an inhale ending and an exhale beginning. Keep doing that until you feel comfortable with it, and then slowly expand your attention a little at a time: to other experiences associated with breathing, to non-breath-related bodily sensations, to non-tactile sensations from your environment, and finally to internal mental sensations like emotions.
If you notice an impulse to focus your attention on a particular thought, following it and engaging with it—perhaps you notice you feel hungry, and in response you begin to focus your attention on planning lunch—instead of letting that impulse take over your attention, recognize it as yet another change in the activity of your mind. If you’re narrating, say, “now I’m feeling an impulse to plan my lunch”, and keep your focus broad enough to catch the next thought when it arises. If you realize that you’ve already become lost in a particular thought, notice that realization itself as a new thought, and return to observing your stream of consciousness by noticing the next new thought that happens as well.
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You might need to practice this many times before you get the hang of it. I suggest trying it for ten minutes to half an hour a day until you do.
Once you feel like you can recognize the sensation of reflective attention and enter that state of mind reliably given time, begin to train for speed. Instead of setting a timer for fifteen minutes or however long you want to practice, set it to go off every minute for the first half of your practice, spending one minute in reflective attention, and one minute out. (Don’t do this for all of your practice. You still need to practice maintenance.) When you can consistently arrive in reflective attention by the end of the minute, cut the intervals down to 45 seconds, then thirty, fifteen, and five.
In real life, the suspicion that you may be lost in an unskillful state of mind will be quiet and fleeting. “Quiet” means you’ll need to learn to snap your attention to the slightest hint of that feeling. For that, you’ll need to train “noticing”. “Fleeting” means you’ll need to be able to respond in less than five seconds. You’ll need to begin the process in less than one second, even if it takes a little longer to fully arrive in reflective attention. For that, training for speed is crucial.
LSD, Meditation, Enlightenment, and Ego Death
A little background information first, I'm a computer science/neuroscience dual-major in my junior year of university. AGI is what I really want to work on and I'm especially interested in Gortzel's OpenCog. Unfortunately I do not have nearly the understanding of the human mind I would like, let alone the knowledge of how to make a new one.
DavidM's post on meditation is particularly interesting to me. I've been practicing mindfulness-based meditation techniques for some time now and I've seen some solid results but the concept of 'enlightenment' was always appealing to me, and I've always wanted to know if such a thing existed. I have been practicing his technique for a few weeks now and although it is difficult I believe I understand what he means by 'vibrations' in your attentional focus.
I've experimented with psilocybin mushrooms for about a year now. Mostly for fun, sometimes for better understanding my own brain. Light doses have enhanced my perception and led me to re-evaluate my life from a different perspective, although I am never as clear-headed as I would like.
I've read that LSD provides a 'cleaner' experience while avoiding some of the thought-loops of mushrooms, it also lasts much longer. Stanislav Grof once said that LSD can be to psychology what the microscope is to biology, with deep introspection we can view our thoughts coalesce. After months of looking for a reliable producer and several 'look-alike' drugs I finally obtained a few doses of LSD. Satisfied that it was the real thing I took a single dose and fell into my standard meditation session, trying to keep my concentration on the breath.
I experienced what wikipedia calls 'ego death'. That is I felt my 'self' splitting into the individual sub-components that formed consciousness. Acid is well-known for causing synaesthesia and as I fell deeper into meditation I felt like I could actually see the way sensory experiences interacted with cognitive heuristics and rose to the level of conscious perception. I felt that I could what see 'I' really was, what Douglas Hofstadter referred to as a 'strange loop' looking back on itself, with my perception switching between sensory input, memories, and thought patterns resonating in frequency with DavidM's 'vibrations'. Of course I was under the effects of an hallucinogenic drug, but I felt my experience was quite lucid.
DavidM hasn't posted in years which is a shame because I really want to see his third article and ask him more about it. I will continue practicing his enlightenment meditation techniques in an attempt to try to foster these experiences without the use of drugs. Has anyone here had experiences with psychedelic drugs or transcendental meditation? If so, could you tell me about them?
[LINK] Meditation Can Debias The Mind
This is interesting. Apparently, meditating for 15 minutes can reduce susceptibility to the sunk cost bias.
Across two separate experiments, the researchers tested this by giving one group of participants a 15-minute mindfulness meditation induction.Then they were given a business scenario which was designed to test the sunk cost bias.
In comparison to a control condition, thinking mindfully doubled the number of people who could avoid the sunk cost bias.
In the control condition just over 40% of people were able to resist the bias. This shot up to almost 80% among those who were thinking mindfully.
The researchers achieved similar results in another experiment and then went on to examine exactly how mindfulness is helpful.
In a third experiment they found that mindfulness increases the focus on the present moment, as it should.
A focus on the present in turn reduced negative feelings participants had about the ‘sunk cost’–the time, money and effort that had gone to waste.
This reduction in negative emotion meant participants were much better equipped to resist the bias.
Ironically, I did a search on Less Wrong to see if something like this had been posted before and came across this comment:
Good points. The lack of scientific research discussed is certainly an issue. I did a quick literature sweep before writing this post, but decided not to include that information here.
One is a sunk cost fallacy. If you have sunk ten days into it you are less willing to ditch it because fallible humans are often unable to act like good economists and recognize that sunk costs are irrelevant.At the dhamma.org courses I haven't found that to be the case. The management at the Massachusetts center informed me that a large majority of students never return to take a second course. Perhaps the cost needs to be larger; people may find it difficult to give up the practice (when they have good reason to) if they have done it daily for some length of time.
According to that anecdote, a large majority of students never take a second course in meditation. It might be due to the study above, where meditating itself makes people less likely to engage in sunk cost thinking.
Two angles on Repetitive Strain Injury
Discussion of buckling-spring keyboards, which give accurate tactile feedback. You can get them for about $70, and a lot of people swear by them.
Here's my RSI story: Some years ago, I was getting a lot of pain in my right elbow, presumably as + result of excessive Blockout (3D tetris), counted crosstitch, and being polite for no good reason to someone I was very angry at when I was under stress. Rest was not helping. I remember needing to sign a bunch of checks, and using my right hand for the signatures and my left for the account numbers, and it was still hard on my elbow.
The Way of Energy is an excellent introduction to Taoist standing meditation. I worked up to being able to do twenty minutes of just plain standing and twenty minutes of holding a balloon (arms circled at a little below shoulder level) a day. After mere weeks, my elbow problem went away and never came back. Subjectively, I hit a point in meditation where it became obvious to me that I was using more effort to stand than I needed to, and I could just let go of the excess tension.
Thinking without words?
Before language, people must have thought without words. I often have the impression that I have a thought fully-formed in my head, yet I wait to listen to it unfold in words before moving on to the next thought. Perhaps I could think much faster if I weren't addicted to words.
Has anyone developed techniques for thinking without words?
This would have a little in common with Buddhist practices of emptying your mind, but wouldn't be the same thing. For one thing, Buddhists also try to empty their minds of images. More importantly, they are trying not to think, while I'm trying to think - just not unpack everything into words.
Vipassana Meditation Open Thread
Related to: Understanding vipassana meditation, Vipassana Meditation: Developing Meta-Feeling Skills
This is a place to discuss experiences and problems related to practicing vipassana meditation. This space can also be used to organize meditation events or retreats.
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