All of dsatan's Comments + Replies

dsatan40

In my experience with meditation literature, and with the sort of tech bro who takes acid, becomes enlightened in some way and becomes a metta bro, the "ontologies" or explanatory frameworks that they use are most always very bad and deeply incorrect and in some cases can lead people to very dark places for a long time. However they only provide interpretation and articulation of insight, or practice instructions for finding the insight in the first place, and are not the same as that insight. I do think the various insights are still valuable, and that th... (read more)

dsatan10

Yes. That is the logical induction I was talking about.

dsatan-10

If you're so interested in logical induction, aren't you already assuming that classical mathematics is The One True Logic? Why is that? Why not look at ordinary mathematics internal to a topos and then ask what logical induction looks like for that?


And as for reflection, a topos with a NNO has (higher order) primitive recursion so your claim about not having reflection is confusing.

And lastly, your title doesn't match your thesis. All you show is that you can't directly do probability in toposes. Category theory is extraordinarily usef... (read more)

0jollybard
This is the logical induction I was thinking of.
dsatan30

I think an important point here and with noticing a lot of things in general, is that the taste of lotus is somatically present - you can feel it in your body. I think that if one practices becoming attuned to the physical sensations in your body then a lot of things become available to Noticing. There is just *so much* that goes on in the body when you do things. This is a generalization of a key insight of Focusing - it's not just beliefs that you can get a handle on through your body. Action and decision are present there too (initiate the action o... (read more)

dsatan40

As someone who independently came across this, the generative seed for this idea was using Focusing on why I kept scrolling down on Facebook (which I'm happy is an example here).

dsatan10

Crushing what I say into some theory of bayesian epistemology is a great way of destroying the meaning of what I say.

But to try to fit it into your theory without losing as much information as your attempt: humans, by the evolved structure of our brains, especially by the nature of human perception and decision making, have a built in ontology - the way we cut out things in our perception as things, and the way we see them as being things which are relevant to our involvements in the world. You can't get rid of it, you can only build on top of it. Mis... (read more)

2TurnTrout
I wasn’t trying to be rude, I just thought you were claiming something else entirely. My apologies. I still don‘t understand the point you’re making with respect to mystical experiences, and I’d like to be sure I understand before giving a response.
dsatan20

I think one of the biggest things Peterson has to offer is a way out of many of the fake frameworks that rationalists hold, by offering a fake framework which takes Being as primary, and actually being able to deal with Being directly (which becomes possible with a fake framework which permits the concept of being) is a pathway to Looking.

5vedrfolnir
What does "deal with Being directly" mean?
dsatan30

Parent commenter is doing some pretty serious cherry picking. 2) and 3) can basically be ignored. 2) comes from a 2013 deleted tweet which the parent commenter has pulled off of archive, and 3) from a 2011 debate which is anyways misrepresented by the parent commenter. He never lays out something that can unambiguously be taken to be quantum mysticism, even though he starts out talking about copenhagen. "consciousness creates reality" does actually correspond to a reasonable position which can be found by being a little charitable and spending so... (read more)

dsatan10

When is something a misinterpretation of sensory input? When the interpretation is not rendered in terms of the laws of physics which your alternative implies or...?

A better hypothesis is "in a metaphysics which takes Being as primary, which is not in any way contrary to science (since science does not imply a metaphysics like scientific realism or reductive and eliminative materialism), mystical experience is permissible and not contrary to anything we know".

2TurnTrout
That’s a long way of saying "theory with a strictly greater complexity and exponentially smaller prior probability than reductionism"
dsatan10

It's hard to get Peterson second-hand. I recommend actually watching some of his lectures

dsatan10

While Peterson is a bit sloppy when he talks about truth, the notion of truth that he is working with is not simply his own construction to write some bottom line. There is a lot of literature of pragmatist analyses of truth and belief that roughly align with what he is saying and I would consider closer to what is the nature of truth (truer about truth) than the correspondence theory of truth presented in the sequences.

I recommend Peirce's Making our Ideas Clear, Putnam's Corresponding with Reality, and James's The Will to Believe. Peirce and James can easily be found free online by searching and I can PM you Putnam if you want it.

dsatan50
All of those frameworks are fake in the sense that introvert isn’t a basic physical entity the same way an up quark is.

The reductive materialism implicit in this is as fake as introverts - possibly even more fake because unless you have a particle accelerator on hand, "everything is made of quarks" translates 100% to hypotheticals rather than anything you can actually do or see in the world; and in the presence of a particle accelerator, that 100% is reduced by epsilon.

2dsatan
I think one of the biggest things Peterson has to offer is a way out of many of the fake frameworks that rationalists hold, by offering a fake framework which takes Being as primary, and actually being able to deal with Being directly (which becomes possible with a fake framework which permits the concept of being) is a pathway to Looking.
dsatan20

There are a lot of different people who talk about similar thing. Impro was mentioned. There's also Jung. They are probably interrelated and have similar influences. I'd be very wary of Chaos Magick in who it seems to explicitly break down useful psychic walls for the sake of freedom and power (eg. rejecting virtue).

dsatan20

Pretty sure I have a handle on it now.

dsatan10

Ah, I remember having the distinct impression of drawing a blank when reading that sentence. Your further description helps, but it's feeling a little vague. I think I can kind of see it in my memory of past interactions, but I don't think I have enough of a handle on it that it seems like I could have done much differently. The referent of "not-knowing," and what it is not-knowing of is fuzzy/not so clear to me (though as I am writing all of this, it is becoming clearer and clearer). Is it not-knowing of how the scene will unfold? Of w... (read more)

2dsatan
Pretty sure I have a handle on it now.
1Valentine
I find myself wanting to do the annoying zen thing of answering "mu". I think that's the most accurate answer. I'll try saying more words, though, to offer an illusion of it being more satisfying: You're trying really hard to understand what it is that you're not knowing. Or rather, your character is trying really hard at this. Whether it succeeds by its own standards or not is totally irrelevant. If you Look, honestly, at what it is that you do not know, you'll See what I mean. I claim.
dsatan60
In my usage, "fake" doesn't necessarily mean "wrong". It means something more like "illusory". The point of a framework, to me, is that it pumps intuition and highlights clusters and possible Gears. But all of that is coming from your mind, not the territory.
Like, it's worth remembering that you don't see molecules. When you look at a glass of water and think "Oh, that's dihydrogen monoxide", if you can't tell that that's a thought you're adding and not what you're seeing, then
... (read more)
3Valentine
Yep, I agree. I'm also concerned that the theory you're pointing out has an ontology problem. I'm hoping to get to spelling my concern out — but that's several posts later in the sequence.
dsatan30

Supposing I know how to Look, when and where do I Look, and what might I see? For my own purposes, I want to get a better idea of what my own role Looks like, see where I can move within the slack that I have, and see where tension in the web is coming from so that I can create more slack if needed.

2Valentine
Yep. From the OP: You're watching for the way that stories arise and play out, how people are falling into characters, the way that justifications arise in you, etc. And… you're noticing the gap that's between all of them. The sort of canvas on which it's all written. This can't be analytical, since that's within the character part of you. You have to watch your character and the whole scene from the transcendental not-knowing space that can never be tangled up in the web. After a while, I claim, you can sort of "get" what the underlying patterns are, and how to act on them from outside your character. And how to lean into your character in order to produce the right effects on the web strands around you. And where you, the player, have room to reach for and tug on a different role for yourself. And what the consequences are for the web as a whole. But in the meantime, you're just Looking at how the scene plays out, in detail, from the not-knowing. Does that help?
dsatan32
I understand, thank you.

I really really don't think you have. And I really think that this interaction has been a net negative for you. You have not demonstrated at any point that you have understood me. You have, in fact, failed to engage with me at all save to dismiss what I've written out of hand and call it absurd. Do you realize how stressful this interaction has been for me? How I am putting myself out there and you just attack in poor faith? I don't really get the sense that you are even trying to understand me. This comment of yours ... (read more)

3meedstrom
If it helps, your explanations made perfect sense to me, like plain English.  So thank you for putting yourself out there; you gave me and others something to chew on.
4Said Achmiz
I would be happy to take this conversation to another venue (public or private, at your option; I have a blog whose comments section we can use, or perhaps IRC; email is also an option). For various reasons, LW is not ideal for continuing this discussion.
dsatan90

a) I was saying things that I believed, but not all things you can do with words is to state true propositions. "Go wash the dishes" is not true. "Go to the kitchen and see what's in the sink" is also not true. That is a type error. There is also a sense in which "the thing in the sink is what I call a knork" is not true if "knork" is not a word used by anyone but the person who is telling you that that think is a "knork" - if there is no larger social context for that to contradict. That last one is w... (read more)

5Said Achmiz
I understand, thank you. I believe I have gotten everything I could out of this thread. Your comments have been very valuable.
dsatan21

What is the metaphyiscal nihilism problem... Do you know the person Shminux? (edit) He's a lesswronger from way back. He avoids unsig "real", and "true", and things of that sort for this very reason. His catchphrase is "it's just a model".

And I'm quite confident that you've misinterpreted or don't understand about 70% of what I've said, but your rejection is all "this is absurd" so it's hard to get anything to grab onto there.

(Edit) the entirety of my response was a mistake. You&#x... (read more)

1Said Achmiz
This seems important. Please elaborate! What were you doing? Wasn’t it “trying to answer my questions”, “saying things you consider to be true”, etc.? That’s what I usually assume people do, when they post comments in response to things I’ve asked. If you weren’t doing that, then (a) why on earth not, and (b) what were you doing?
dsatan8-2

What I went through is what I've seen many people get from the sequences. While I'm knocking down a strawman (insofar as what Eliezer's vague writing actually pinpoints a single discernable position), it is a strawman that many people actually believe. There are people who literally say beliefs are the same thing as probabilities or probability distributions after having read the sequences. I would be interested in how you'd summarize it though.

Yes, what I did was the same thing that a lot of enlightenment philosophers did, though slopp... (read more)

dsatan10

A few points. The metaphysical nihilism I was referring to is taking the logical step of realizing that that image of a man in an image of reality is just a model, that everything you think of is just in your head, so everything is just a model. "real" becomes meaningless - dereferenced from any particular thing.

Second, to be clearer about what actually requires Looking, you need Looking to some extent to understand what I'm doing in the analysis of reality (though I think I'm getting better at forcing people to Look so that they can un... (read more)

9Said Achmiz
This turns out to be mostly addressed in my response to your other comment, so I don’t have very much to say here. I’ll comment only that as far as I can tell, you’re knocking down strawmen and solving problems that don’t exist. That those problems would not require any ‘Looking’ to solve even if they did exist adds insult to injury. Like, who has this “metaphysical nihilism” problem? Surely not anyone who has read and understood the Sequences (nor much of anyone else)… no doubt there are some people out there, who are confused in this particular way—but that’s true of almost any sort of confusion, no matter how silly. So if I don’t have the problem you cite, nor ever did have it, and can hardly even comprehend the confusion that would lead anyone to have it, what am I to think of your holding up your alleged solution to this non-problem as something which is unattainable without this particular unusual skill you vaunt? In any case—to reiterate what I say in my other comment: thank you for taking the time to respond; I really do appreciate it.
dsatan180

People tend to get exactly the quoted part out of the sequences somehow, not the rejection of it. I didn't explain it there because it takes a lot of writing to do so, but I will do it here.

The image we are given in the sequences, in map and territory and in epistemology 101, is that light hits a thing, reflects off of your shoe, hits your retina, a signal is sent down some optical pathways, and you experience seeing your shoe. Then, note that there are many parts of this pathway that can be interrupted. So you have the reality out there, and the pers... (read more)

The image we are given in the sequences… [snipped]

It would be a drastic understatement to say that what you wrote in that paragraph is a ludicrous misunderstanding of what Eliezer wrote. I could call it a ‘distortion’, but it’s more like literally the opposite of what the Sequences say. (The part about probability in particular makes me question whether we read the same posts or, indeed, live in the same reality; suffice it to say that you certainly did not understand what was said in the Sequences about probability theory.)

The entirety of that section ... (read more)

1dsatan
A few points. The metaphysical nihilism I was referring to is taking the logical step of realizing that that image of a man in an image of reality is just a model, that everything you think of is just in your head, so everything is just a model. "real" becomes meaningless - dereferenced from any particular thing. Second, to be clearer about what actually requires Looking, you need Looking to some extent to understand what I'm doing in the analysis of reality (though I think I'm getting better at forcing people to Look so that they can understand it, but with regards to looking, that's like someone holding up your bike and guiding you along instead of you balancing for yourself). Looking is necessary to come up with such an analysis in the first place. Looking is not necessary to understand the personal bubble, or to understand action fields. Looking is necessary to see them for the first time without someone pointing them out to you, and is very helpful in analyzing their structure. (edit) Furthermore, a good chunck of people who read what I just wrote will be mislead as to what Looking is. The fundamental issue is that we are communicating in language, the medium of ideas, so it is easy to get stuck in ideas. The only way to get someone to start looking, insofar as that is possible, is to point at things using words, and to get them to do things. This is why I tell you to do things like wave your arms about or attack someone with your personal bubble or try to initiate the action of touching a hot stove element. (edit) Lastly, there is this so much to Look at. I am mostly Looking at Things, and The World. There is this whole realm of People which I have almost no experience Looking at and have only scratched the surface of with personal bubbles. Val is much more experienced at this, which is why he is able to do some of the things that he claims and I am not. It is also why I haven't actually tried to point at that sort of stuff. But it is still there,
dsatan10

(I wrote a comment and it disappeared. Hopefully it doesn't show up along with this one)

How is Val's first response to Ben not satisfactory?

But here are a few things that it's done for me:

  • Things like your personal bubble will not be invisible by default. Your personal bubble is real and just there despite it "not being made of atoms" and it "just being a thing your brain injects into your map". Looking will give you handles and sensors relevant to all sorts of different parts of you, like those handles and sensors relevan
... (read more)
3Raemon
Quick meta note: neither comment of yours has disappeared, but once there are more than 100 comments in a post, they don't all render at first (because rendering more than 100 comments at once is a bit bandw idth intensive). You have to click the "load more" at the top of the comments to see your new one.
dsatan2-2

How is Val's first response to Ben not what you are looking for?

For some actual cake, here's what it can give you, based on my experience of what it has given me:

  • An example: there was a philosophical line of thought originating from lesswrong about the nature of reality. Enlightenent will allow you to see how there is a discrepancy between the use of the word reality in accordance with this theory and the original use of the word. It will then allow you to actually look at what is going on, what is the nature of the original use, and what is the
... (read more)

I must say I am perplexed by comments such as this. (Don’t get me wrong—I’m not singling you out in any way; this is only the latest in a pattern.)

In what world does any of what you wrote, there, constitute anything like: (a) concrete actionable knowledge or understanding; or (b) actual, real-world benefits?

It feels strange to do this, given how vague all of this is, but let’s try to tackle at least your first bullet point:

there was a philosophical line of thought originating from lesswrong about the nature of reality

To what line of thought to do you r... (read more)