Humans are really not so dissimilar compared to what's probably out there. I had my moment in the desert where I was asked, 'What do you want?', and the answer was 'Global Peace'. To a certain extent, I wish I had your life. But then, I wouldn't have my three kids, and I wouldn't have had that moment where something said back to me, "Global Peace? That old chestnut? Seriously? Oh, you are serious. Okay, this is what you have to do..."
Let me go find out more about lie detectoring companies in London.
Hmm. Let me try to restate this. What I'm trying to do is to create a protocol for reporting weird experiences as we close in on the Singularity. If I'm correct about a soft Zoo Hypothesis (basically a 'leaky' Prime Directive situation, with Contact contingent on creation of an ASI or a warp gate/drive), with several interstellar civilizations with mindjacking tech monitoring the planet, then attempts to influence human global development do occur, probably by the panhuman equivalent of special forces, i.e., 'Special Circumstances' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture).
I assume the number of civilizations out there is small, technological development is broadly equivalent due to leveling up via aid/trade relationships, and philosophical positions are diverse, if only due to such basic differences as physiology.
If this is correct, Earth, going into the Singularity, will a battleground, not over territory, although Earth is an incredibly bio-diverse rich piece of real estate, but over spheres of influence, with fundamental philosophical positions coming into play, such as whether or not ASIs are even legal, whether Earth would ally with an imperial panhuman civilization versus a federation post-Singularity, and so on.
In my 'soft' Zoo Hypothesis, the curating civilizations could all get together and act collectively to intervene, pushing humanity in a certain direction. Alternatively, given the tech involved, no matter how good the regulatory system is that's designed to prevent a free for all, there exists the possibility of competitive external interventions.
In this scenario, the results of these disagreements - or agreements - and the will and means to act - is that there will be 'nudge points'.
The single most important concern I can see going into the Singularity is whether the world is at peace, because if it isn't, a) warfare will drive AI development towards an ASI, and b) a warlike ASI could emerge. Alexei Turchin has made this very clear in his
Well, this is where we regress from the rum and uncanny to normality. If I were in a position to be able to reproduce atypical brain states involving the appearance of electrical input or output that just blew away the technology being used to monitor it, that would be one heck of a result. It could also be a dangerous result, personally and politically.
But, to take that point on board, first we test my veracity (lie detector), then we test by sanity (psychiatric eval), then we test whether I can replicate any of this using something like an MRI (objectivity). However, the latter does not rely solely on me if I'm not generating these phenomena.
Alright, I'll draw up the brief for the lie detector company this week based on the above events, then I'll draw up a list of five of these companies, put that all together at the end of this week, and you can randomly select a company.
Just because I've always wanted to, I'm going to thrown in some questions about meeting aliens, my own humanity, whether I've ever another planet, etc. Basically, if I'm going to pay for someone to lie detector me, I want my Keanu Reeves moment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_2l0RjZvOI
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That's a fascinating link you supplied there! I have no doubt that Hallucinogen Persisting Perceptual Disorder exist. Sunglasses and talk therapy seems to be of use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_perception_disorder
Maybe everyone on the West Coast wearing sunglasses is just trying to deal with their HPPD? ;<)
I would also say there's a definite chance of a link between devouring psychedelics and hallucinations, including of rainbows!
Unfortunately, I wasn't on psychedelics before, during, or after the experiences I just related here. I had been doing some Buddhist meditation, including down to the zen states. My personal zen meditation has induced temporary minor lens flare, say 2-3% of the intensity in the picture linked to in the article, and focused on a single object, while fully awake: https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/hppd_town.jpg However, this is minor and transient compared with what I'm describing.
Okay, so what happened next was I got hit with a literal barrage of a 4x8 grid of electric blue lights, from lucid dreams all the way down to 'real' dreams. So, this was a recurring dream, literally dozens of times. The blue lights could flare in intensity as a grid. Of all things, it made me think of a phased array communication system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array
Now, what would happen was that I would go to sleep, then I would dream of the grid, then I would transition to a lucid dream where i was in the presence of whatever the phased array was communicating with. I got the feeling that the other end of the grid had a grid of its own, a big, and old, white one, and that it was large, intelligent, powerful, and far away.
This definitely meant something important, like an attempt at communication, and it recurred for months before going away.
Now, a whole bunch of stuff happened after this, but the above is basically what I wanted to go on the record about on lesswrong.
If you have any questions, I can answe
Oh, it just gets better. So, the rational thing to do at this stage, I thought, was to send the possible mindjackers an email, to see if I could establish two-way communication. So, I reasoned if they have the tech to mindjack and are putting me under the spotlight, presumably reading my emails is ongoing and trivial. So, I sent an email to myself stating (and I can't remember the sentence exactly, 100%, but it was at least 90% semantically this): "May I ask you a question?"
That night, I was lying there in bed, awake but with my eyes closed, and so I get the same feeling that something's in my mind, and then I see a question mark emerge in my vision. It develops rainbow colors, so it starts red at the top of the question marks and goes down to violet, with the question mark fading from the top.
So, it was as clear as this in terms of the outline, but with softer transitions between the colors, and slightly softer colors: https://stock.adobe.com/uk/images/rainbow-flag-gay-question-mark/25315121
So, this is a really clever semiotic response to my emailed question because the question mark as an interrogatory symbol can mean all of the following and more: who, what, where, when, how, why, how much, how many?
It also confirms, assuming I'm telling the truth and am not crazy, that the email was being monitored, which was interesting.
It's also showing off, i.e., demonstrating really good mastery of the mind medium and of semantics and semiotics. Basically, it was a smart thing to do.
Any questions?
Yeah, it is also worth looking on the bright side, because I am willing to bet my life on the fact the panhumans have a sense of humour. I would hope the ASI does, too. Frankly, I found most of these experiences humorous or at least just weird rather than fear or paranoia inducing. Anyway, on to Experience 2!
So, I think this next one was a basic psychological evaluation, probably military. The interstellar cops were not ready for something that pushed back from being pulled over and shown the giant panhuman head ID, so they hit me with a series of sequenced and structured nightmares on a common theme over three days. This was a really interesting experience, because I have only ever heard of recurring nightmares. Anyway, only the first nightmare was scary because by the second night I figured it was an administered experience. Once you figure out what is happening in a nightmare, it's like you solve it, right? So, it is no longer a nightmare, simply an experience.
So, night one, semi-lucid dream, sniper in the opposite house aiming at you. I have read that the sniper nightmare is a standard nightmare for anyone with trench warfare/urban combat .
Next night two, slightly lucid dream, something at the foot of the bed nightmare. Standard childhood nightmare.
Next, deep dream, walking down a corridor, open a door, monster's behind a door dream. Again, standard nightmare.
So, I had three different stereotypical nightmares at different, increasingly deep, levels of sleep in what appeared to be a sequence over three days.
I have never heard of sequential nightmares before except in decent sci fi, in which they are administered, and like I said, the 'evaluation' kind of lost all power once the second nightmare hit. By the third nightmare it felt as if whoever was administering the evaluation was giving up, TBH.
So, given I'm willing to testify using a lie detector that this experience actually happened, I would say what this demonstrates is an ability to manipulate
Okay, so I’ll try to report a summary of some of the weird experiences I had while working on leveraging the coming fusion breakthrough for global peace to avoid global warming and ASI-enabled or directed warfare. And I’ll try to apply the objective system outlined above. I’ll do these one at a time, so you can ask questions.
Experience 1: Being pulled over by the interstellar cops for speeding while in control of a human Mind.
So, not too long after I start working on fusion, about five years ago now, I was awake, with my eyes closed, lying face down on my bed. So, with your eyes closed, it’s black, right?. But, you know your eyes are closed and you’re not dreaming because you can still ‘see’. Then, boom, out of a pinprick this stylized panhuman head suddenly appears in that blackness, filling most of my field of vision. My immediate feeling as a semiotician was that it was a stop and search, and that this was basically an ID badge. So, the head was egg-shaped, dark grey, black eyes, but no ears, nose, or mouth. So, it was not a real head, just a symbol.
Now, the other thing I that the experience was intrusive and something humans don't usually experience. It was like you take one hand, make it a fist, then someone else inserts a finger from their hand in that fist. It was just very obvious. And, I was definitely awake, because the granularity was high. I literally could feel real sweat dripping off my back and down my legs, and when I opened my eyes after it was over, there was no discontinuity in feeling and the sweat was still dripping. It felt like something had jacked my optic nerve and related areas of the mind.
Anyway, I started to push back against the Mind inside my Mind, basically threatening that I would go to town on it with a mindful of love. I was and am a progressive Buddhist, but I had a decent sci-fi education as a youth and I was not about to be mind pwned by some interstellar cop, and, so I was actually getting some traction, and I could feel
From Cheng, there may be aspects to the world that appear to be a participatory hallucination, rather than the entire world, unless, like I said, we go down the Von Neumann-Wigner explanation for reality, which I try to avoid. So, for example, SETI and others have been looking for alien transmissions for decades now, with nothing to show for it. The Zoo Hypothesis provides really obvious explanations for that, namely that something's interfering with the transmissions/jamming the detectors/affecting the signal processors. A panhuman ASI could do that. The end result would be a form of collective participatory hallucination. Or, another example would be why alien UFOs are really quite difficult to see, without going into exotic explanations like flipping in and out of extra dimensions. The obvious explanation would be that they use adaptive camouflage. Again, the end result would be a form of collective participatory hallucination.
Oh, I've had more than flashes. I've had a whole series of full granularity two-way nudge-like events that, if they were not in logical sequence and did not revolve around my work on leveraging fusion for peace-building to prevent both global warming and ASI-enabled or directed warfare on this planet, would be viewed as wholly acausal experiences probably deserving of specialist attention.
However, before we get onto them, we need to establish more credentials at my end. So, from my ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3626-533X it can be seen that I'm a trained linguist, specifically an applied linguist, with special expertise in ethnolinguistics (languages of ethnic minorities), sociolinguistics (language as used in society, so for example power relations between dialect groups) and semiotics (the meaning of symbols and signs). So, for example, this article of mine, which is available for free online
Implications of the Urban Landscape: Aspects of the Isan Cultural Maintenance and Revitalization Program, Journal of Urban Culture Researc
Link to a good source with solid concepts there. So, let's prioritize cluster thinking and then attempt to regress to normality. So, in this post, we are trying to create a space where people can report acausal phenomena that may be affecting them while working on developing AI, AGI, and the related socioeconomics and geopolitics 'Big Questions', like global peace.
So, as an example, we know Elon Musk reads Iain M Banks' Culture series. He decides to build his own rockets and then decides to do Neuralink. Why? Causally, we have the answer to both of those. He's explained why in interviews, and people could and have written books about the psychology of why Elon Musk. However, we do not know whether or not he was affected in apparently acausal ways to pursue both these paths, especially the Neuralink development. In my terms, he could have been 'nudged' by panhumans or by an ASI or by the 'Master Coder' (if we're in a simulation) to develop Neuralink. I don't know if anyone has even asked him whether or how he gets 'flashes' of insight. Or, being Elon Musk and immersed in decent science fiction as well as science fact, he may actually be having lucid dreams where he's communicating with imaginary sci-fi panhumans over Neuralink design aspects. The overwhelming probability is that these dreams are simply dreams, with a very low probability that they may be panhuman or ASI-nudges. However, the probability that it is nudges is probably higher with Elon Musk than with Joe Average, unless one believes all dreams of conscious beings are somehow manifestations of self-repairing code in a simulation managed by an external entity or even more exotically manifestations of constantly collapsing Von Neumann-Wigner wave functions which somehow permit quantum events in what could be shared dreamspace, etc.
Still, if we go with nudges, this means we need a reporting system for them. I suggest this (with a humorous example included):
Explicit nudge: Marvin Minsky-style fluorescen
Thanks for sharing! That explains the connection between you and I that created this comment chain, which, TBH, is the outcome I was hoping for when I posted the main post, complete with nudge/nude typo.
I think we both basically accept the possibility that we exist within some kind of Laboratory Hypothesis situation and function not just as humans but as parts of a Bostrom cookie, where weird, apparently acausal events can happen that in fact may have an underlying causality and so rationality, just one that does not readily admit of rational explanation, because what we can see of the underlying code - the effects, not the actual code itself - appears incompatible with our present scientific knowledge.
So, going into the Singularity, to use an analogy for a Bostrom cookie that children could understand, my perspective is that we are as individuals are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that scales up to the entire global community of humans, with a picture on the puzzle that we cannot see. However, some of us, at least, are just beginning to wake up to the possibility that we pieces of the puzzle may have to communicate with each other in order to solve it. I don't believe anyone else is going to do it for us, unless we perhaps create and ask an artificial superintelligence (ASI) we create to do that for us.
However, my whole point is that we have not ended interstate war on earth, that we are running out of opportunities to do so, and that this will be critical to our relationship with both aliens and an ASI; the United Nations is not a global peace treaty. States already employ AI to undermine democracies, steal industrial secrets, and exploit financial systems. The US, Russia, and China are developing AI for maintenance of global technological supremacy and/or global domination, including cyber-warfare, not for altruistic reasons. Thus any human-created ASI is very likely to be imperfectly constructed in terms of final goals, may not comply in terms of solving the pu
1) Re the Fermi Paradox, I assume a 'soft form' of the Zoo Hypothesis is in operation, sometimes called the 'Laboratory Hypothesis': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis. Some people get scared by this concept, but large zoos usually do have scientific laboratories attached to them, for veterinarian purposes. Zoos are, just like museums, curated and regulated, and that requires tweaking, or 'nudges'. I'm definitely not saying aliens caused Covid-19. We have our own relationship with biodiversity to thank for that, due to population expansion. I am saying that aliens may risk nudging humanity towards global peace in the belief that they may be able to justify this nudge, of only a few individuals, for maximum benefit, to each other, to a 'Galactic Council' if such a thing exists, and to us, once we are a superluminary civilization ourselves.
2) Yes, I definitely see the UN Secretary General calling for a global ceasefire as a 'potential' second 'Global Peace' nudge point, i.e., where alien curators might 'nudge' the zoo's inhabitants to not tear each other apart, especially given the zoo's inhabitants are armed with nuclear weapons and are developing offensive AI and even AGI, which seems a pretty perilous course of action. The occasion was sufficiently rare and unusual and came so close to succeeding that the nearest parallel was 75 years ago, in the Baruch Plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Plan. This would make the Baruch Plan, which was spurred by the development of fission, the first 'Global Peace' nudge point.
3) The basic premise is that 'Global Peace' nudge points require either a major tech leap or a global disaster. Theoretically, the development of dynamite (think of the Nobel Peace Prize) or electricity, or a major asteroid impact, on other planets, could have resulted in the 'Global Peace' outcome, which would have facilitated development of a beneficial artificial superintelligence (ASI). Given the first and second nudge points failed,
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