I'm in the process of writing a summary and analysis of the key arguments and points in that debate.

The most recent version runs at 28 pages - and that's just an outline.

I've entertained a similar hypothesis myself.

As for its relation to SL4, I'd say that it sounds roughly right - I wouldn't go as far as to say that there was "no real subject matter", but it's true that the list eventually ran out of worthwhile things to say that hadn't been already discussed.

It's not as much the duration itself, as how much you can achieve during that duration. With a 60 minute meditation, it's possible to reach far deeper states of concentration than with a 15 minute meditation. If you can accomplish that, then 60 minutes is probably better. On the other hand, if your concentration skills aren't developed enough yet, it may not be possible for you to meditate that long effectively, or you might put less effort into it since you feel you have plenty of time. I still sometimes get the best results when I'm short on time, because I'm forced to actually concentrate and don't have high expectations.

I'd say to do 15-minute sits at first, and then gradually push up the duration when you start getting the feeling that you could go on for a while longer. Experiment with what works best for you.

I'm not procrastinating, I'm taking a break from work.

Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers.

(Humor, three-minute YouTube clip.)

Dead.

I think the argument you make in this comment isn't a bad one, but the unnecessary and unwarranted "Apostle Yudkowsky (prophet of the Singularity God)" stuff amounts to indirectly insulting the people you're talking with and, makes them far less likely to realize that you're actually also saying something sensible. If you want to get your points across, as opposed to just enjoying a feeling of smug moral superiority while getting downvoted into oblivion, I strongly recommend leaving that stuff out.

Good work!

Imagine, an intelligence that didn't have the universal emotion of badweather!

Of course, extraterrestrial sentients may possess physiological states corresponding to limbic-like emotions that have no direct analog in human experience. Alien species, having evolved under a different set of environmental constraints than we, also could have a different but equally adaptive emotional repertoire. For example, assume that human observers land on another and discover an intelligent animal with an acute sense of absolute humidity and absolute air pressure. For this creature, there may exist an emotional state responding to an unfavorable change in the weather. Physiologically, the emotion could be mediated by the ET equivalent of the human limbic system; it might arise following the secretion of certain strength-enhancing and libido-arousing hormones into the alien's bloodstream in response to the perceived change in weather. Immediately our creature begins to engage in a variety of learned and socially-approved behaviors, including furious burrowing and building, smearing tree sap over its pelt, several different territorial defense ceremonies, and vigorous polygamous copulations with nearby females, apparently (to humans) for no reason at all. Would our astronauts interpret this as madness? Or love? Lust? Fear? Anger? None of these is correct, of course the alien is feeling badweather.

Although the exact relationship isn't known, there's a strong connection between IQ and working memory - apparently both in humans and animals. E.g. Matzel & Kolata 2010:

Accumulating evidence indicates that the storage and processing capabilities of the human working memory system co-vary with individuals’ performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks. The ubiquitous nature of this relationship suggests that variations in these processes may underlie individual differences in intelligence. Here we briefly review relevant data which supports this view. Furthermore, we emphasize an emerging literature describing a trait in genetically heterogeneous mice that is quantitatively and qualitatively analogous to general intelligence (g) in humans. As in humans, this animal analog of g co-varies with individual differences in both storage and processing components of the working memory system. Absent some of the complications associated with work with human subjects (e.g., phonological processing), this work with laboratory animals has provided an opportunity to assess otherwise intractable hypotheses. For instance, it has been possible in animals to manipulate individual aspects of the working memory system (e.g., selective attention), and to observe causal relationships between these variables and the expression of general cognitive abilities. This work with laboratory animals has coincided with human imaging studies (briefly reviewed here) which suggest that common brain structures (e.g., prefrontal cortex) mediate the efficacy of selective attention and the performance of individuals on intelligence test batteries. In total, this evidence suggests an evolutionary conservation of the processes that co-vary with and/or regulate “intelligence” and provides a framework for promoting these abilities in both young and old animals.

or Oberauer et al. 2005:

Hence, we might conclude—setting aside the above mentioned caveats for such analyses—that [Working Memory Capacity] and g share the largest part of their variance (72%) but are not identical. [...] Our methodological critique notwithstanding, we believe that Ackerman et al. (2005) are right in claiming that WMC is not the same as g or as gf or as reasoning ability. Our argument for a distinction between these constructs does not hinge on the size of the correlation but on a qualitative difference: On the side of intelligence, there is a clear factorial distinction between verbal and numerical abilities (e.g., Su¨ß et al., 2002); on the side of WMC, tasks with verbal contents and tasks with numerical contents invariably load on the same factor (Kyllonen & Christal, 1990; Oberauer et al., 2000). This mismatch between WMC and intelligence constructs not only reveals that they must not be identified but also provides a hint as to what makes them different. We think that verbal reasoning differs from numerical reasoning in terms of the knowledge structures on which they are based: Verbal reasoning involves syntax and semantic relations between natural concepts, whereas numerical reasoning involves knowledge of mathematical concepts. WMC, in contrast, does not rely on conceptual structures; it is a part of the architecture that provides cognitive functions independent of the knowledge to which they are applied. Tasks used to measure WMC reflect this assumption in that researchers minimize their demand on knowledge, although they are bound to never fully succeed in that regard. Still, the minimization works well enough to allow verbal and numerical WM tasks to load substantially on a common factor. This suggests that WMC tests come closer to measuring a feature of the cognitive architecture than do intelligence tests.