Replying toAgainst empathy-by-default

“If I’m thinking about how to pick up tofu with a fork, I might analogize to how I might pick up feta with a fork, and so if tofu is yummy then I’ll get a yummy vibe and I’ll wind up feeling that feta is yummy too.”

Isn't the more analogous argument "If I'm thinking about how to pick up tofu with a fork, and it feels good when I imagine doing that, then when I analogize to picking up feta with a fork, it would also feel good when I imagine that"? This does seem valid to me, and also seems more analogous to the argument you'd compared the counter-to-common-sense second argument with:

“If I’m thinking about what someone else might do and feel in situation X by analogy to what I might do and feel in situation X, and then if situation X is unpleasant than that simulation will be unpleasant, and I’ll get a generally unpleasant feeling by doing that.”

Replying toSecular interpretations of core perennialist claims

zhukeepa1y

Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims

I think I assign close to zero probability to the first hypothesis. Brains are not that fast at thinking, and while sometimes your system 1 can make snap judgements, brains don't reevaluate huge piles of evidence in milliseconds. These kinds of things take time, and that means if you are dying, you will die before you get to finish your life review.

My guess is that our main crux lies somewhere around here. If I'd thought the life review experience involved tons and tons of "thinking", or otherwise some form of active cognitive processing, I would also give ~zero probability to the first hypothesis.

However, my understanding of the life review experience is that... (read more)

Replying toSecular interpretations of core perennialist claims

zhukeepa1y

Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims

I'm curious for your models for why people might experience these kinds of states.

One crucial aspect of my model is that these kinds of states get experienced when the psychological defense mechanisms that keep us dissociated get disarmed. If Alice and Bob are married, and Bob is having an affair with Carol, it's very common for Alice to filter out all the evidence that Bob is having an affair. When Alice finally confronts the reality of Bob's affair, the psychological motive for filtering out the evidence that Bob is having an affair gets rendered obsolete, and Alice comes to recognize the signs she'd been ignoring all along.

I'm pretty much proposing an analogous mechanism, except with the full confrontation of our mortality instead, and the recognition of what we'd been filtering out happening in a split second. (It's different but related with ayahuasca, which is famous for its ability to penetrate psychological defense mechanisms, whether we like it or not.)

Replying toSecular interpretations of core perennialist claims

zhukeepa1y

Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims

@habryka, responding to your agreement with this claim:

a majority of the anecdata about reviewing the details of one's life from a broader vantage point are just culturally-mediated hallucinations, like alien abductions.

I think my real crux is that I've had experiences adjacent to near-death experiences on ayahuasca, during which I've directly experienced some aspects of phenomena reported in life reviews (like re-experiencing memories in relatively high-res from a place where my usual psychological defenses weren't around to help me dissociate, especially around empathizing with others' experiences), which significantly increases my credence on there being something going on in these life review accounts beyond just culturally-mediated hallucinations.

Abduction by literal physical aliens is obviously a... (read more)

Replying toSecular interpretations of core perennialist claims

zhukeepa1y

Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims

Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts! A couple of thoughts in response:

I suspect that the principles you describe around the "experience of tanha" go well beyond human or even mammalian psychology.

That's how I see it too. Buddhism says tanha is experienced by all non-enlightened beings, which probably includes some unicellular organisms. If I recall correctly, some active inference folk I've brainstormed with consider tanha a component of any self-evidencing process with counterfactual depth.

Forgiveness (non-judgment?) may then need a clear definition: are you talking about a person's ability not to seek "tanha-originating revenge," while still being able to act out of caring self-protection?

Yes, this pretty much aligns exactly with how I think about forgiveness!

Replying toSecular interpretations of core perennialist claims

zhukeepa1y

Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims

I really like the directions that both of you are thinking in.

But I think the "We suffered and we forgive, why can't you?" is not the way to present the idea.

I agree. I think of it more as like "We suffered and we forgave and found inner peace in doing so, and you can too, as unthinkable as that may seem to you".

I think the turbo-charged version is "We suffered and we forgave, and we were ultimately grateful for the opportunity to do so, because it just so deeply nourishes our souls to know that we can inspire hope and inner peace in others going through what we had to go through."... (read more)

Replying toSecular interpretations of core perennialist claims

zhukeepa1y

Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims

Here's something possibly relevant I wrote in a draft of this post that I ended up cutting out, because people seemed to keep getting confused about what I was trying to say. I'm including this in the hopes that it will clarify rather than further confuse, but I will warn in advance that the latter may happen instead...

The Goodness of Reality hypothesis is closely related to the Buddhist claim of non-self, which says that any fixed and unchanging sense of self we identify with is illusory; I partially interpret “illusory” to mean “causally downstream of a trapped prior”. One corollary of non-self is that it’s erroneous for us to model ourselves as a

zhukeepa1y

Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims

Your section on "tanha" sounds roughly like projecting value into the world, and then mentally latching on to an attractive high-value fabricated option.

I would say that the core issue has more to do with the mental latching (or at least a particular flavor of it, which is what I'm claiming tanha refers to) than with projecting value into the world. I'm basically saying that any endorsed mental latching is downstream of an active blind spot, regardless of whether it's making the error of projecting value into the world.

I think this probably brings us back to:

A big problem with this post is that I don't have a clear idea of "tanha" is/isn't, so

zhukeepa1y

Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims

I'm open to the hypothesis that the life review is basically not a real empirical phenomenon, although I don't currently find that very plausible. I do think it's probably true that a lot of the detailed characteristics ascribed to life reviews are not nearly as universal as some near-death experience researchers claim they are, but it seems pretty implausible to me that a majority of the anecdata about reviewing the details of one's life from a broader vantage point are just culturally-mediated hallucinations, like alien abductions. (That's what I'm understanding you to be claiming, please let me know if I'm wrong.)

For example, the anecdatapoint in the link I'd shared about the guy... (read more)

Replying toHow I started believing religion might actually matter for rationality and moral philosophy

zhukeepa1y

How I started believing religion might actually matter for rationality and moral philosophy

Regarding your second point, I'm leaving this comment as a placeholder to indicate my intention to give a proper response at some point. My views here have some subtlely that I want to make sure I unpack correctly, and it's getting late here!

Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims

zhukeepa

After the release of Ben Pace's extended interview with me about my views on religion, I felt inspired to publish more of my thinking about religion in a format that's more detailed, compact, and organized. This post is the second publication in my series of intended posts about religion.

Thanks to Ben Pace, Chris Lakin, Richard Ngo, Damon Pourtahmaseb-Sasi, Marcello Herreshoff, Renshin Lauren Lee, Mark Miller, Roger Thisdell, and Imam Ammar Amonette for their feedback on this post, and thanks to Kaj Sotala, Tomáš Gavenčiak, Paul Colognese, and David Spivak for reviewing earlier versions of this post. Thanks especially to Renshin Lauren Lee, Roger Thisdell, and Imam Ammar Amonette for their input on... (read 4200 more words →)

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How I started believing religion might actually matter for rationality and moral philosophy

zhukeepa

After the release of Ben Pace's extended interview with me about my views on religion, I felt inspired to publish more of my thinking about religion in a format that's more detailed, compact, and organized. This post is the first publication in my series of intended posts about religion.

Thanks to Ben Pace, Chris Lakin, Richard Ngo, Damon Pourtahmaseb-Sasi, Marcello Herreshoff, Renshin Lauren Lee, Mark Miller, and Imam Ammar Amonette for their feedback on this post, and thanks to Kaj Sotala, Tomáš Gavenčiak, Paul Colognese, and David Spivak for reviewing earlier versions of this post. Thanks especially to Renshin Lauren Lee and Imam Ammar Amonette for their input on my claims about religion... (read 2099 more words →)

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Extended Interview with Zhukeepa on Religion

Ben Pace

Ben Pace, zhukeepa

Introduction from Ben

Zhukeepa is a LessWronger who I respect and whose views I'm interested in. In 2018 he wrote the first broadly successful explication of Paul Christiano's research ideas for AI alignment, has spent a lot of time interviewing people in AI about their perspectives, and written some more about neuroscience and agent foundations research. He came first in the 2012 US Math Olympiad, and formerly worked on a startup called AlphaSheets that raised many millions of dollars and then got acquihired by Google.

He has also gone around saying (in my opinion) pretty silly-sounding things like he believes in his steelman of the Second Coming of Christ. He also extols the virtues... (read 35417 more words →)

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CTMU insight: maybe consciousness *can* affect quantum outcomes?

zhukeepa

From one of justinpombrio’s comments on Jessica Taylor’s review of the CTMU:

I was hoping people other than Jessica would share some specific curated insights they got [from the CTMU]. Syndiffeonesis is in fact a good insight.

The reply I'd drafted to this comment ended up ballooning into a whole LessWrong post. Here it is!

It used to seem crazy to me that the intentions and desires of conscious observers like us can influence quantum outcomes (/ which Everett branches we find ourselves in / "wave function collapses"), or that consciousness had anything to do with quantum mechanics in a way that wasn’t explained away by decoherence. The CTMU claims this happens, which seemed crazy to me at... (read 1207 more words →)

Have the lockdowns been worth it?

Ben Pace

Ben Pace, zhukeepa, Tim Liptrot

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the pandemic lockdowns have been worth it. However, much of the reasoning that we’ve seen has been very motivated and un-nuanced in a way that for us has distorted a lot of the information.

So this is not a thread for taking a position on that. This is a thread for raising individual considerations that are relevant for thinking about the question “Have the pandemic lockdowns, in general, been worth it?”

Every answer to this thread should analyze a single belief that is relevant to whether pandemic lockdowns have been worth it, such as