William Joy

I suspect the answer lies in the riddle of existence itself, and an informationless zero ontology. Any failure of unitarity - the slightest deviation from the unitary Schrödinger dynamics - would create information. The creation of information ex nihilo is logically impossible.

@webmasterdave @SteveStuWill Not excluding those who endorse high tech jainism!

"The Dark Triad is a collection of personality traits associated with socially aversive behavior... If you’re high in one, you’re more likely to be high in the others. That’s because they all share a common core: callous manipulativeness." stevestewartwilliams.com/p/12-things-ev…

Nietzsche's path out of suffering –– to create ferociously like you're waging a coup d'etat against the present –– appeals to me best

@FarOutBio Sent an email!

@Williamjoyful If you ever wanna swap notes, find me at valenceengineer@proton.me

very true

@gcolbourn @MatriceJacobine @xriskology @RemmeltE @DavidSKrueger This is it: the problem is no one has a classical explanation. I can offer a steelman only by highlighting how quantum-theoretic accounts of phenomenal binding are extremely implausible because the effective lifetime of neuronal superpositions in the CNS is femtoseconds or less.

1/7 90+ people at the University Club of SF last night for Worthy Successor Theme: If AGI is here soon, and we can't expect to control it for long - what trajectory should we set it on while we still have some influence? Major takeaways from the event below:

Guys, if you're interested in neuroscience, consciousness, vibes, and groundbreaking science you've GOTTA watch this presentation. Dr. Joana Cabral provides shockingly strongly empirical evidence for the connectome-specific harmonic wave paradigm (cf. geometric eigenmodes). This is a theory proposes in 2016 that takes the idea that the brain activity operates on harmonic resonance (not a new idea per se, see Steve Lehar and others) and, for the first time, figures how to empirically test it with fMRI (by literally doing spectral analysis on connectome graphs and then reconstructing brain activity as weighted sums of the eigsnmodes of the graph). Although there has been an increasing amount of evidence for the theory that brain activity as measured by fMRI is explained in terms of weighted sums of harmonic resonant modes of the whole brain (cf. Luppi etc al.), a lot of scientists remain skeptical. Some people even argue that it's nothing more than just a "change of basis" and thus doesn't explain anything (just re-maps brain activity to a different way of representing it). This is not the case if you read carefully the papers: they make sure to show that decomposing brain activity into just a few brain harmonics explains much more of the variance than you would expect if the harmonic waves weren't there. But clear visualizations of this have never been really available: fMRI is too noisy, and thus all you can do is show grainy pictures and say "trust me, if you run the statistics there are harmonic resonant waves here". Enter Joana's work. Here she decided to focus on a single slice of a rodent brain using a 9+ Tesla fMRI. Thus this is the highest resolution imaging available anywhere for studying harmonic resonance in the brain. It allows ultra high precision in the temporal domain while having a 2D surfaces to analyze. Not only the statistics, but also the visuals are extremely compelling. You can literally see the resonant waves in here. Link to the timestamp that shows this. Note: based on Mike Johnson's STV and Selen Atasoy's model, in 2017 I made some predictions about how we can expect valence to show up in the brain- you can find it in classic QC/QRI post "Quantifying Bliss". I think it's now time that we will be able to test this crisply, given this recent work and the high resolution imaging used. Will the prediction be right? We'll see :D youtu.be/6e_1mQalqwY?t=…

@webmasterdave @HetkeBrian @sama More fundamentally: hedweb.com/nihilism/nihil… should really try to formalize this mathematically! digital AI will soon help with this.

Two senses of idealism: I'm highly confident that (1) what each of us apprehends as the external world is a world-simulation run by one's mind. I'm not at all confident - though it's my working assumption - that (2) the inconceivably vaster reality beyond our throwaway toy world-simulations is experiential, i.e. non-materialist physicalism: #nonmat" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">hedweb.com/quora/2015.htm…

!!

great paper

@viemccoy Transhumanism with a sole focus on morphological freedom and no emphasis on changing/engineering consciousness is naive and uninteresting.

I think a lot of transhumanists have an escape-fantasy where they get to take their existing mental-motions and place them in a new body sort of without consequence, with the idea that this will heal them or be super fun or whatever. While I think this will be possible, I expect it to be extremely traumatic, and that people who are investing into their sense of embodiment and health now will be far more ready to reap the benefits when body modification technology gets much better. As it stands, I think ripping the mind out of the bodymind and trying to throw it into a new "shell" ignores the fact that the body is also part mind, and that the bodymind is not two things. It is one thing! In many cases, I think you actually will be able to sever the body from the mind and go into a new body fresh. But I don't think this will work for everyone, and I think people who have some sort of comfort and appreciation for their existing form will be much more resistant to the body-double equivalent of organ rejection. Ultimately, the lesson I'm trying to point at here is pretty mundane. Even if you plan to leave your body once the singularity hits (a type-error tragedy if ever I've seen one...), becoming embodied now and learning to love your form will serve you in your long-term goals. It may even help you enjoy your pre-singularity time a little bit more while you're still here.

@garrytan @kane ridiculous anachronism that silicon valley coexists with such stupidity. Although turning the other cheek is generally good, the wealth tax and other trends show the parasite is only growing

@kane Legacy media is a disgrace in the Bay Area

If only we had a word for "fatally assaulted"

Longevity is cool, but with neurotechnology and psychopharmacology we will be able to increase phenomenal time sufficiently to make one year feel like ten

@webmasterdave @RokoMijic @algekalipso Most people will want to enhance their intelligence and control their consciousness with neurotechnology IMO, and in the short term this is the best way to give people the option of a more sublime motivational system!

@RokoMijic @algekalipso forbes.com/sites/bernardm… Of course, most people don't want to become cyborgs. So I focus on engineering information-sensitive gradients of bliss. Intuitively, pleasure can't be as motivating as pain. But just think of what some (human and nonhuman animals) will do to have sex...

When you die and face The Architect: "Well, so did you figure out what your mission was?" "Uh?" "You were meant to reduce as much suffering as possible, didn't you see all the clues? I'm afraid I can't recommend your substrate code for the next level. You missed the point."

@webmasterdave @maxhodak_ Inexcusable that grok forgot to reference physicalism.com

@webmasterdave @maxhodak_ @wesroth Some links to where David explains this stuff in full: x.com/i/grok/share/l…

Geoffrey Hinton believes there’s nothing cognitive humans can do that AI won’t eventually do. He argues that all mental abilities reasoning, planning, creativity will be solvable by software or neural networks. Even things we think are deeply human, like empathy, are being matched or exceeded by machines.

Two kinds of idealism: (1) non-materialist physicalism: mathematical physics describes patterns of qualia. Experience discloses the essence of the physical, the mysterious "fire" in the equations. (2) all one can ever access are the contents of one's own conscious mind and the phenomenal world-simulation it runs. What naive realists conceive as the external world is just one's own perceptual consciousness. I'm confident of (2). By contrast, non-materialist physicalism (1) is just my working hypothesis. And GPT-6 etc? It's a micro-experiential zombie. Classical digital computers cannot solve the phenomenal binding problem. No binding = no mind = invincible ignorance of the empirical realm. We are creating alien (super)intelligence, not alien minds.

@BagOfNeurons @ben_d_norman Most of human nature should be reformed, Darwinian reward circuits especially. I'm actually ambivalent about whether we should increase romantic attraction a thousandfold or do away with it altogether.

@ben_d_norman @Williamjoyful batsignal for your take 🤔

So, like, when molecular asemblers solve material scarcity and biotech gives us total morphological freedom, what will romantic attraction largely base off of now that money and looks have been decentralised?

@nickcammarata here is a whole paper listing interesting/unexplored avenues for ultrasound research into conscious perception arxiv.org/abs/2507.08517

@nickcammarata Neurotechnologies will be developed in the next decades that can take you far beyond eg. the buddha's baseline and also let you get far more done. Meditation is a very crude methodology