All of jbkjr's Comments + Replies

I assume that phenomenal consciousness is a sub-component of the mind.

I'm not sure what is meant by this; would you mind explaining?

Also, the in-post link to the appendix is broken; it's currently linking to a private draft.

It sounds to me like a problem of not reasoning according to Occam's razor and "overfitting" a model to the available data.

Ceteris paribus, H' isn't more "fishy" than any other hypothesis, but H' is a significantly more complex hypothesis than H or ¬H: instead of asserting H or ¬H, it asserts (A=>H) & (B=>¬H), so it should have been commensurately de-weighted in the prior distribution according to its complexity. The fact that Alice's study supports H and Bob's contradicts it does, in fact, increase the weight given to H' in the posterior relativ... (read more)

Why should I include any non-sentient systems in my moral circle? I haven't seen a case for that before.

To me, "indecision results from sub-agential disagreement" seems almost tautological, at least within the context of multi-agent models of mind, since if all the sub-agents were in agreement, there wouldn't be any indecision. So, the question I have is: how often are disagreeing sub-agents "internalized authority figures"? I think I agree with you in that the general answer is "relatively often," although I expect a fair amount of variance between individuals.

I'd guess it's a problem of translation; I'm pretty confident the original text in Pali would just say "dukkha" there.

The Wikipedia entry for dukkha says it's commonly translated as "pain," but I'm very sure the referent of dukkha in experience is not pain, even if it's mistranslated as such, however commonly.

Say I have a strong desire to eat pizza, but only a weak craving. I have a hard time imagining what that would be like.

I think this is likely in part due to “desire” connoting both craving and preferring. In the Buddhist context, “desire” is often used more like “craving,” but on the other hand, if I have a pizza for dinner, it seems reasonable to say it was because I desired so (in the sense of having a preference for it), even if there was not any craving for it.

I think people tend to crave what they prefer until they’ve made progress on undoing the h... (read more)

I'd be interested if you have any other ideas for underexplored / underappreciated cause areas / intervention groups that might be worth further investigation when reevaluated via this pain vs suffering distinction?

Unfortunately, I don’t have much to point you toward supporting that I’m aware of already existing in the space. I’d generally be quite interested in studies which better evaluate meditation’s effects on directly reducing suffering in terms of e.g. how difficult it is for how many people to reduce their suffering by how much, but the EA commu... (read more)

Then the question is whether the idiosyncratic words are only ever explained using other idiosyncratic words, or whether at some point it actually connects with the shared reality.

The point is that the words ground out in actual sensations and experiences, not just other words and concepts. What I’m arguing is that it’s not useful to use the English word “suffering” to refer to ordinary pain or displeasure, because there is a distinction in experience between what we refer to as “pain” or “displeasure” and what is referred to by the term “dukkha,” and t... (read more)

My point is that in English "experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain" would be considered an uncontroversial example of "suffering", not as something suffering-neutral to which suffering might or might not be added.

Sure, but I think that’s just because of the usual conflation between pain and suffering which I’m trying to address with this post. If you ask anyone with the relevant experience “does Buddhism teaching me to never suffer again mean that I’ll never experience (severe) pain a... (read more)

The assumption that these can be completely dropping the habit is entirely theoretical. The historical Buddha's abilities are lost to history. Modern meditators can perform immense feats of pain tolerance, but I personally haven't heard one claim to have completely eradicated the habit of suffering.

I believe Daniel Ingram makes such a claim by virtue of his claim of arhatship; if he still suffers then he cannot reasonably claim to be an arhat. He also has an anecdote of someone else he considers to be an arhat saying “This one is not suffering!” in resp... (read more)

I think you're right about all the claims of fact. The Buddha won't suffer when he feels pain. But unenlightened beings, which is all the rest of us, particularly animals, will.

But the example of the Buddha goes to show that humans have the capacity to not suffer even in painful circumstances, even if right now they do. It’s not like “unenlightenment” is something you’re forever resigned to.

So taking pain as a proxy for suffering is pretty reasonable for thinking about how to reduce suffering

I agree that in most cases where someone suffers in the pr... (read more)

The message of Buddhism isn’t “in order to not suffer, don’t want anything”; not craving/being averse doesn’t mean not having any intentions or preferences. Sure, if you crave the satisfaction of your preferences, or if you’re averse to their frustration, you will suffer, but intentions and preferences remain when craving/aversion/clinging is gone. It’s like a difference between “I’m not ok unless this preference is satisfied” and “I’d still like this preference to be satisfied, but I’ll ultimately be ok either way.”

I wouldn’t say suffering is merely preference frustration—if you’re not attached to your preferences and their satisfaction, then you won’t suffer if they’re frustrated. Not craving/being averse doesn’t mean you don’t have preferences, though—see this reply I made to another comment on this post for more discussion of this.

I don’t know if I would say depression isn’t painful, at least in the emotional sense of pain. In either case, it’s certainly unpleasant, and if you want to use “pain” to refer to unpleasantness associated with tissue damage and “displea... (read more)

My sense is that existing mindfulness studies don't show the sort of impressive results that we'd expect if this were a great solution.

If you have any specific studies in mind which show this, I would be interested to see! I have a sense that mindfulness tends to be studied in the context of “increasing well-being” in a general sense and not specifically to “decrease or eliminate suffering.” I would be quite interested in a study which studies meditation’s effects when directly targeting suffering.

Also, I think people who would benefit most from havin

I want to address a common misconception that I see you having here when you write phrases like:

not many people… are going to remain indifferent about it

“… I can choose to react on them or to ignore them, and I am choosing to ignore this one”

when people feel pain, and a desire to avoid that pain arises…

a person who really has no preference whatsoever

to the level that they actually become indifferent to pain

Importantly, “not being averse to pain,” in the intended sense of the word aversion, does not mean that one is “indifferent to pain,” in... (read more)

It seems a bit misguided to me to argue “well, even in the absence of suffering, one might experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain, so this ‘not suffering’ can’t be all it’s cracked up to be”—would you rather experience suffering on top of that pain? With or without pain, not suffering is preferable to suffering.

For example, with end-of-life patients, circumstances being so unpleasant doesn’t mean that they may as well suffer, too; nor does “being an end-of-life patient” being a possible experience... (read more)

Which of the following claims would you disagree with?

1. Craving/aversion causes suffering; there is suffering if and only if there is craving/aversion.
2. There are practices by which one can untrain the habit of craving/aversion with careful attention and intention.
3. In the limit, these practices can result in totally dropping the habit of craving/aversion, regardless of circumstance.
4. The Buddha practiced in such a manner as to totally stop craving/aversion, regardless of circumstance.
5. Therefore, the Buddha would not be averse to even the most extreme pain and therefore not suffer even in the most painful circumstances possible.

Interestingly, I had a debate with someone on an earlier draft of this post about whether or not pain could be considered a cause of suffering, which led to me brushing up on some of literature on causation.

What seems clear to me is that suffering causally depends on craving/aversion, but not on pain—there is suffering if and only if there is craving/aversion, but there can be suffering without pain, and there can be pain without suffering.

On Lewis' account, causal dependence implies causation but not vice versa, so this does not itself mean that pain cann... (read more)

Re: 2, I disagree—there will be suffering if there is craving/aversion, even in the absence of pain. Craving pleasure results in suffering just as much as aversion to pain does.

Re: 4, While I agree that animals likely "live more in the moment" and have less capacity to make up stories about themselves, I do not think that this precludes them from having the basic mental reaction of craving/aversion and therefore suffering. I think the "stories" you're talking about have much more to do with ego/psyche than the "self" targeted in Buddhism—I think of ego/psy... (read more)

You're welcome, and thanks for the support! :)

Re: MAPLE, I might have in interest in visiting—I became acquainted with MAPLE because I think Alex Flint spent some time there? Does one need to be actively working on an AI safety project to visit? I am not currently doing so, having stepped away from AI safety work to focus on directly addressing suffering.

Lukas, thanks for taking the time to read and reply! I appreciate you reminding me of your article on Tranquilism—it's been a couple of years since I read it (during my fellowship with CLR), and I hadn't made a mental note of it making such a distinction when I did, so thanks for the reminder.

While I agree that it's an open question as to how effective meditation is for alleviating suffering at scale (e.g. how easy it is for how many humans to reduce their suffering by how much with how much time/effort), I don't think it would require as much of a commitm... (read more)

If I understand the example and the commentary from SEP correctly, doesn't this example illustrate a problem with Lewis' definition of causation? I agree that commonsense dictates that Alice throwing the rock caused the window to smash, but I think the problem is that you cannot construct a sequence of stepwise dependences from cause to effect:

Lewis’s theory cannot explain the judgement that Suzy’s throw caused the shattering of the bottle. For there is no causal dependence between Suzy’s throw and the shattering, since even if Suzy had not thrown her ro

Thanks so much for this—it was just the answer I was looking for!

I was able to follow the logic you presented, and in particular, I understand that $\left\{3\right\}⇝\{2,3\}$ and $\{2,3\}⇝\left\{2\right\}$ but not $\left\{3\right\}⇝\left\{2\right\}$ in the example given.

So, I was correct in my original example of c->d->e that

(1) if c were to not happen, d would not happen

(2) if d were to not happen, e would not happen

BUT it was incorrect to then derive that if c were to not happen, e would not happen? Have I understood you correctly?

I'm still a bit fuzzy on the informal counterexam... (read more)

One idea as to the source of the potential discrepancy... did any of the task prompts for the tasks in which it did figure out how to use tools tell it explicitly to "use the objects to reach a higher floor," or something similar? I'm wondering if the cases where it did use tools are examples where doing so was instrumentally useful to achieving a prompted objective that didn't explicitly require tool use.

Great post. My one piece of feedback is that not calling the post "Deconfusing 'Deconfusion'" might've been a missed opportunity. :)

I even went to this cooking class once where the chef proposed his own deconfusion of the transformations of food induced by different cooking techniques -- I still use it years later.

Unrelatedly, I would be interested in details on this.

The way I'd think of it, it's not that you literally need unanimous agreement, but that in some situations there may be subagents that are strong enough to block a given decision.

Ah, I think that makes sense. Is this somehow related to the idea that the consciousness is more of a "last stop for a veto from the collective mind system" for already-subconsciously-initiated thoughts and actions? Struggling to remember where I read this, though.

It gets a little handwavy and metaphorical but so does the concept of a subagent.

Yeah, considering the fact tha... (read more)

Wouldn't decisions about e.g. which objects get selected and broadcast to the global workspace be made by a majority or plurality of subagents? "Committee requiring unanimous agreement" feels more like what would be the case in practice for a unified mind, to use a TMI term. I guess the unanimous agreement is only required because we're looking for strict/formal coherence in the overall system, whereas e.g. suboptimally-unified/coherent humans with lots of akrasia can have tug-of-wars between groups of subagents for control.

The arrows show preference: our agent prefers A to B if (and only if) there is a directed path from A to B along the arrows.

Shouldn't this be "iff there is a directed path from B to A"? E.g. the agent prefers pepperoni to cheese, so there is a directed arrow from cheese to pepperoni.

Great post. That Anakin meme is gold.

“Whenever you notice yourself saying ‘outside view’ or ‘inside view,’ imagine a tiny Daniel Kokotajlo hopping up and down on your shoulder chirping ‘Taboo outside view.’”

Somehow I know this will now happen automatically whenever I hear or read “outside view.” 😂

The Buddha taught one specific concentration technique and a simple series of insight techniques

Any pointers on where I can find information about the specific techniques as originally taught by the Buddha?

I've found this interview with Richard Lang about the "headless" method of interrogation helpful and think Sam's discussion provides useful context to bridge the gap to the scientific skeptics as well as to other meditative techniques and traditions (some of which are touched upon in this post). It also includes a pointing out exercise.

Late to the party, but here's my crack at it (ROT13'd since markdown spoilers made it an empty box without my text):

Fbzrguvat srryf yvxr n ovt qrny vs V cerqvpg gung vg unf n (ovt) vzcnpg ba gur cbffvovyvgl bs zl tbnyf/inyhrf/bowrpgvirf orvat ernyvmrq. Nffhzvat sbe n zbzrag gung gur tbnyf/inyhrf ner jryy-pncgherq ol n hgvyvgl shapgvba, vzcnpg jbhyq or fbzrguvat yvxr rkcrpgrq hgvyvgl nsgre gur vzcnpgshy rirag - rkcrpgrq hgvyvgl orsber gur rirag. Boivbhfyl, nf lbh'ir cbvagrq bhg, fbzrguvat orvat vzcnpgshy nppbeqvat gb guvf abgvba qrcraqf obgu ba gur inyhrf naq ba ubj "bowrpgviryl vzcnpgshy" vg vf (v.r. ubj qenfgvpnyyl vg punatrf gur frg bs cbffvoyr shgherf).

Ah, it was John's post I was thinking of; thanks! (Apologies to John for not remembering it was his writing, although I suppose mistaking someone's visual imagery on a technical topic for Eliezer's might be considered an accidental compliment :).)