lesswrong.comLessWrong 2.0

This website requires javascript to properly function. Consider activating javascript to get access to all site functionality. LESSWRONG LW Login Home Open Questions Library Rationality: A-Z The Codex HPMOR Community Events Rationality Vienna [Virtual] Meetup, May 2020 [Tomorrow] Mother of Learning [Tomorrow] How should we make decisions concerning global catastrophic risk? All Posts About FAQ Donate Tags Home Questions Library Community All Posts Recommendations Core Reading 90 Scope Insensitivity First post in Rationality: A-Z Eliezer Yudkowsky 399 Eight Short Studies On Excuses First post in The Codex Scott Alexander 104 Chapter 1: A Day of Very Low Probability First post in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Eliezer Yudkowsky Log in to save where you left off Recently Curated 101 Negative Feedback and Simulacra Elizabeth 3d 18 113 How to evaluate (50%) predictions Rafael Harth 8d 47 98 Problem relaxation as a tactic Ω TurnTrout 13d Ω 8 More Curated View All Curated Posts • Subscribe (RSS) Subscribe via RSS • Subscribe (Email) Subscribe via Email Latest Posts Filter: No Personal Blogposts 103 Assessing Kurzweil predictions about 2019: the results Stuart_Armstrong 2d 12 55 Tips/tricks/notes on optimizing investments Q Wei_Dai 2d Q 17 86 A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence: introduction and preamble Kaj_Sotala 3d 33 39 Coping and Cultures Spiracular 2d 13 37 Specification gaming: the flip side of AI ingenuity Ω Vika , vlad_m , Matthew Rahtz , tom4everitt , xrchz , Zac Kenton , janleike 2d Ω 0 16 Kurzweil's predictions' individual scores Stuart_Armstrong 1d 0 90 Insights from Euclid's 'Elements' TurnTrout 4d 9 11 Meditation skill: Surfing the Urge Max Hodges 1d 3 39 Maths writer/cowritter needed: how you can't distinguish early exponential from early sigmoid Ω Stuart_Armstrong 2d Ω 12 47 Writing Causal Models Like We Write Programs Ω johnswentworth 3d Ω 4 45 "AI and Efficiency", OA (44✕ improvement in CNNs since 2012) gwern 3d 0 34 How can nonprofits gain the advantages of the for-profit model? jasoncrawford 3d 0 20 [AN #98]: Understanding neural net training by seeing which gradients were helpful Ω rohinmshah 2d Ω 3 Load More Advanced Sorting/Filtering Recent Discussion Meditation skill: Surfing the Urge 11 Max Hodges 1d 2 min read Show Highlight Surfing the Urge: A distress tolerance skill I learned this meditation technique from my freediving coach. It&aposs a technique we employ during a breath-hold to help us deal with an increasingly strong urge to breath. Understand that the urge to breath is driven by the body’s desire to rid itself of carbon dioxide (CO2)--not (as some assume) your body&aposs desire to take in oxygen (O2). The urge to breath is a warning, however. It can be safely ignore up to a certain limit. That limit, for our purposes, is the loss of consciousness (cerebral hypoxia); however, the urge to breath beco... (Read more) jimmy 11m 2 Understand that the urge to breath is driven by the body’s desire to rid itself of carbon dioxide (CO2)--not (as some assume) your body&aposs desire to take in oxygen (O2). Interestingly enough, this isn&apost entirely true. If you get a pulse oximeter and a bottle of oxygen you can have some fun with it. Because of the nonlinearity in the oxygen dissociation curve , oxygen saturation tends to hold pretty steady for a while and then really tank quickly, whereas CO2 discomfort builds more uniformly. In my experience, when I get that really "pani... (read more) Reply 3 Richard_Kennaway 11h How much hypoxia does it take to cause (lasting) brain damage? Do long-term freedivers run into problems, like old boxers and American footballers? I've always been leery of any sort of intense breathing exercise because of this concern. 2 jimmy 30m Certainly not in any obvious way like people that suffer repeated blows to the head. There's some debate over whether loss of motor control (they call it "samba" because it's kinda like you start dancing involuntarily) can cause damage that makes it more likely to happen again in the future, but I haven't been able to find any evidence that there is any damage at all in normal training and even the former seems to be controversial. A non-mystical explanation of "no-self" (three characteristics series) 34 Kaj_Sotala 8h 20 min read Show Highlight This is the second post of the "a non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence " series. You can read the first post, explaining my general intent and approach, here . On the three characteristics So, just what are the three characteristics of existence ? My take is that they are a rough way of clustering the kinds of insights that you may get from insight meditation : in one way or another, most insights about the structure of your mind can be said to be about no-self, impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, or some combination of them. As upcoming po... (Read more) 1 Korz 30m Thanks for writing this post! Your writing helps me a lot in tying together other's claims and my own experiences into a more coherent model. As Richard_Kennaway points out in their comment, the goal of insight meditation and 'enlightenment' is not necessarily the same as the goal of rationality (e.g. instrumental rationality/shaping the world's future towards a desired goal seems a part of rationality but not of 'enlightenment' as far as I can tell). I would be very interested in your opinion of how instrumental rationality relates to insight meditation and enlightenment. My knowledge around this topic is admittedly weak, but the points where my introspection differs from your description might still be interesting: * When I introspect on my sense of self, my results are that it does stem from a quite localised part of my mind instead of being generated by different parts at different times* * Exploring the self-generating part of my mind led me to think that it can be somewhat described as a consciousness-level goal-setting system. The system's decisions (of endorsement or rejection) can fuel mental processes which gives them the felt property of identity. I think that the goal-setting property fits nicely with the finding that it is not part of one's problem-solving mind, but still a central aspect of the conscious experience. __ *In the sense of: The source is always in the same localised part of my mind – the feeling of self does extend to different parts of my mind in different situations. 4 Mark Neyer 3h Wow! I had written my own piece in a very similar vein, look at this from a predictive processing perspective. It was sitting in draft form until I saw this and figured I should share, too. Some of our paragraphs are basically identical. Yours: "In computer terms, sensory data comes in, and then some subsystem parses that sensory data and indicates where one’s “I” is located, passing this tag for other subsystems to use." Mine: " It was as if every piece of sensory data that came into my awareness was being “tagged” with an additional piece of information: a distance, which was being computed. ... The 'this is me, this is not me' sensation is then just another tag, one that's computed heavily based upon the distance tags. " https://apxhard.com/2020/05/08/mindfulness-as-stack-frame-exploration/ [https://apxhard.com/2020/05/08/mindfulness-as-stack-frame-exploration/] 1 Slider 3h "Sounds like indistuingashble from death" seems like a proper extenson of the "there is a self" view, which is capable of being wrong. I would guess that the claim is that if you experimentally try it out it turns not to be the case and the difference to what is expected is easy when you have direct experience to compare to. However imagining before hand doesn't really help that comparison. it might be related to how the colorscientist Alice seeing red at the first sight "that is red". The theorethical confusion or clarity migth not be strongly correlated to...