All of Waddington's Comments + Replies

Even just writing down loose associations and your emotional state is enough; that's how you get the ball rolling. Try it for two weeks even if it feels useless. Unless you're taking antidepressants in which case this might actually be ineffective. I know this doesn't sound worthwhile, but I know from experience (mine and others) that it usually works.

That's common for beginners. If you want to give this a go, you should start by writing down fleeting, vague associations. "Something a bit sad or disappointing. A car. School and also not school. The texture of cinnamon rolls."

It doesn't matter that you can't remember anything concrete at first. Eventually, you'll remember more and more.

I don't agree with any of this. When I was really into lucid dreaming, I discovered that the best approach is two-fold: keep a detailed dream journal, and make a habit of performing reality checks. That's it. If you don't keep a dream journal, you'll likely have lucid dreams and just ... forget about them. And as for reality checks, my preferred one is trying to push my thumb through my palm. You can do it casually anywhere and it's an instant confirmation.

When I was actively trying to induce them, I often had periods where I had several lucid dreams per n... (read more)

This comment is going to sound mean. Just a fair warning.

This strikes me as a classic case of a guy thinking he's a prophet after doing a bunch of psychedelics. I've seen it over and over again. They are so convinced that they've "got it" that they often manage to convince others they do as well. You could call it the Messiah complex because, well, duh.

And you know what? Being around a bunch of people who are really nice to you feels good. And that feeling of it "clicking" is the feeling of your cognitive dissonance being wiped out by highly motivated reas... (read more)

Not all who wander are lost.

I believe that the inner sense you are talking about is what we call love. We see the beauty around us, and we want to protect it. There are potential paths in front of us. There is a path whereby life is destroyed. There is a path whereby it is saved. Our mission is to keep it on the safe path, so that future generations can continue our mission when we are gone. We do this out of love. As we come to see that every living thing on earth depends on each other, our love grows so that it can embrace it all.

This is why we are willi... (read more)

All analogies rely on isomorphisms. They simply refer to shared patterns. A good analogy captures many structural regularities that are shared between two different things while a bad one captures only a few.

The field of complex adaptive systems (CADs) is dedicated to the study of structural regularities between various systems operating under similar constraints. Ant colony optimization and simulated annealing can be used to solve an extremely wide range of problems because there are many structural regularities to CADs.

I worry that a myopic focus will re... (read more)

What I have to offer is yet another informal perspective, but one that may further the search for formal approaches. The structure of the inner alignment problem is isomorphic to the problem of cancer. Cancer can be considered a state in which a cell employs a strategy which is not aligned with that of the organism or organ of which it belongs. One might expect, then, that advances in cancer research will offer solutions which can be translated in terms of AI alignment. In order for this to work, one would have to construct a dictionary to facilitate the p... (read more)

That only works if you reject determinism. If the initial conditions of the universe resulted in your decision by necessity, then it's not your decision, is it?

I do indeed make myself laugh at times. I think it has something to do with depth. The consequence of a line of thinking can be surprising, and that's probably relevant.

That's an interesting way of looking at it. Feynman had a hunch on the topic, which he shared in his Nobel Prize speech: nature is simple in some sense. We can describe things in many different ways without knowing that we're describing the same thing. Which, he said, is a sort of simplicity.

I absolutely agree. It's a new way of looking at life.

I didn't anticipate that anyone might think I meant that holism itself was a novel idea, biological or otherwise. To clarify: it's not. It has a long history. But most modern versions can be traced back to the Manhattan Project, which some would consider surprising. Recently, the same basic version of biological holism has popped up in several different fields. This convergence, or consilience if you will, is interesting if only because consilience in science is interesting in general.

The historical background was provided as context for those who might ne... (read more)

That's a perfectly reasonable concern. Details keep you tethered to reality. If a model disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.

Personally, I see much promise in this perspective. I believe we'll see many interesting medical interventions in the coming decades inspired by this view in general.

You're right that it probably makes more sense to think of it as a perspective rather than a paradigm. Yet, I imagine that some useful fundamental assumptions may be made in the near future that could change that. If nothing else, a shared language to facilitate the transfer of relevant information across disciplines would be nice. And category theory seems like an interesting candidate in that regard.

I disagree with what you said about optimization, though. Phylogenetic and ontogenetic adaptations both result from a process that can be thought of as optim... (read more)