ok, I'm gonna be real. I love your writing, so I tried to read this.
12 paragraphs in, I knew I was going to need some help. I copied and pasted the article into ChatGPT and asked it to summarize in under 1,000 words. It said it can't work with that much text.
So I pasted in 75% of it. It gave a summary that ended with this. How accurate would you say the Ai summary was?
The Author's Conclusion:
-The author suggests that a deeper understanding of atheism involves acknowledging the limits of science and embracing the mysteries of existence.
-Even with all the powers in the universe, questions of meaning still remain.
-The author states that humans are valuable because we are a stable form of consciousness.
Thought provoking philosophy + practical considerations of building a business and a better internet for all with the Trust Assembly has made you one of my favorite Substacks.
Some people are trapped in endless philosophical circles without any meaningful application to life. Others have the opposite problem and don't consider that there might be so much more. It's very rare that there's someone who's able to do both, and rarer still to share it with the rest of us.
This rules (of course); I suspect a large number of us have thoughts in this domain —including people smarter / more rigorous / more credentialed, who decline to share them for reasons of reputational concern— and I think it's useful to share them, especially for people who might not naturally feel "justified" thinking this way.
If I have any arguments, it's that I don't think there's any discontinuity in Scott's development as you suggest. The fact that you can describe it demonstrates this; a river is *not* a stable shape to you! You are already aware of, and processing, it in the way you describe; that you can also see it as a stable shape is an option available to him, too: a reduction, a metaphorization, a means of allocating attention. More generally, your descriptions constitute "the same thing" as Scott's abilities: you can imagine whatever you want (if you've learned about it), from the view from your doorbell to the evolution of the solar system. Whether it's based on "real time collected data" or "your models of these things" seems not to entail a major difference in consciousness or mind. I guess we'll find out, but Some Guy: you're in many places at once right now!
If he has "more" of that, it's not different between the delta between you now and you at a much younger age, when you couldn't imagine so much, couldn't quickly reduce or process or model so much. It's just more, and this isn't a new kind or way of being. If you saw radiation beyond the visible spectrum, there's no reason to think it would be more significant than "someone who is colorblind" —or even blind!— as opposed to someone who isn't: not that enormous a difference in terms of consciousness or mind, either, oddly (very oddly, I'd say).
I think this is generally true of a lot of these ideas: "Scott created an organic chemistry deep learning model and incorporated that into his brain. He can see a virus or bacteria and cure it, no problem. He can tell the side-effects of his cure. Snap. Every criminal is followed by a drone that serves the purpose of a decentralized prison and therapist."
You can already do this: we know how to kill every virus or bacteria! Just make a nanorobot that targets its shape or DNA or whatever. We don't know how to build those robots, or power them, but that's not a function of speed or single-origin knowledge in a way that would help this Scott, either; distributed-minds-Scott maybe could do it, but I'm not sure really (this is something I'm not coherent about, though). And you have already described the drone system that could end a lot of crime! Again: what's he got that you ain't got?!
I thought the issue of time was persuasive, though: that changing how time feels (based on changing how much is modeled or experienced... if that's possible, which I'm not sure of) would change mind / consciousness. And everything that followed this section ripped IMO! But I do not really believe in a "higher mind from data or speed"; I think we're universal now, outsource to computers much of what we want, etc., without it changing the situation that dramatically.
But fuck yeah to the entire back-half man, and extremely fun to read, of course!
I believe about 75% of the first part but left out the complicating stuff to get to the second part (and Amanda told me I just needed to write it so I didn’t get to write about morality in the multiverse). For one, I agree with you on the universality of the human mind. In theory. But in practice if you are moving 1,000,000x as fast, you are still a moral agent but for practical reasons you’ve started to schism away from meaningful contact. Keep extending what you know and it’s a bit like talking to someone from Sentinel island. He’s a person and he matters but he also eats people and to explain all the steps to him from “it’s okay to eat people” to “definitely never eat anyone” would take a long time and you’d have to establish a whole new way of communicating. Keep pushing that up and up and it just gets harder. For another, I actually think you’d go nuts if you didn’t have other minds of similar processing speed, depth, and shape as yours. You can’t have one Metatron. He has to have other Metatrons out there he has trouble modeling or predicting to keep him haven’t reflective communication, without which I think he would cease to be sapient. But yes, for all that, a guy. A guy you could communicate with if you did the right things. If I had a big memory and watched atoms collide for a trillion years, I’d be good at chemistry too.
This is the sort of content I was looking forward to when I came to Substack. Thank you for this piece - I’ve skimmed it and now need to go back and reread.
I'm not sure I'm buying this description of an enhanced human brain. One thing about vision is that you simply see one specific spot in your field of vision. We can't Focus on near and far at the same time. At best, part of that vision will be peripheral and blurry, and only some gross change will attract your consciousness. The minute you can be equally focused on near and far, you have abandoned the single consciousness that our brains are capable of.
To give an extreme analogy, I was walking down a train track deep in rumination. Eventually, I heard a blaring train horn. Not sure how close the train was to me—this happened about 20 years ago— but it was too damn close. I was focused on my thoughts and nothing else.
I think what you’re saying is true and scales even up to super-giant minds. However, I also think that if you keep it at the human scale you’re missing something. You can have “focus” in a much bigger mind that encompasses much more than the total sum of all of a person’s focused and unfocused perceptions. If you have the ability to rapidly view all the cells in an organism at the same time another sensor is looking at the whole organism, then your “brain” just needs a way to stitch those two pictures together. We could never do this even if we have the best eyes in the universe. We’d need a bigger brain to make use of all the information.
I still think the conscious human mind can only have one focus at a time. What is also true is that there are unconscious processes that can function at the same time as the conscious process and occasionally emerge, fully formed and seemingly out of nowhere.
I just think that the single focus structure of the conscious mind is so fundamental to the mammalian brain that the minute you can have 2 foci you have left the realm of the mammal brain and stopped being human. I notice my cat is 100 percent occupied with x until she hears a strange noise and then she's 100 percent occupied with that.
If you told me that this human brain of the future could be processing a complex reality unconsciously and then alerted the conscious brain when something worth attending to showed up, then I'd say that was still a human brain having a human experience.
Agreed but I think you can have that deepened and still one type of focus. When a bat uses echolocation I don’t think it tries to juggle sight and sound. I think it’s just a different sense. That’s how I think the experience would work.
My assumption for a bat is that one of those senses is conscious and the other one is processed unconsciously. To further speculate, I would say whatever needs to happen the fastest is handled unconsciously. Bats echolocate to avoid flying into obstacles. A split-second process. Bat's reputedly can't see very well.
Take the example of walking, chewing gum, and having a conversation at the same time. The mental processes that make walking and chewing gum possible are unconscious, while conversation is handled by a conscious process.
There is a psychological theory out there that says the mind is enormously self-censoring. We actually see everything, but our brains filter out most of it. Under hypnosis, people can often remember details of past events that were not noticed consciously at the time. There are also rare individuals with hyper memories who can literally tell you what they had for breakfast on April 14, 2023.
The fundamental difference between you and me is that I simply cannot imagine multifocal mammalian consciousness.
It boils down to the fact that I cannot imagine a multifocal mammalian consciousness and you can.
ok, I'm gonna be real. I love your writing, so I tried to read this.
12 paragraphs in, I knew I was going to need some help. I copied and pasted the article into ChatGPT and asked it to summarize in under 1,000 words. It said it can't work with that much text.
So I pasted in 75% of it. It gave a summary that ended with this. How accurate would you say the Ai summary was?
The Author's Conclusion:
-The author suggests that a deeper understanding of atheism involves acknowledging the limits of science and embracing the mysteries of existence.
-Even with all the powers in the universe, questions of meaning still remain.
-The author states that humans are valuable because we are a stable form of consciousness.
This is a good tl;dr
I’m kinda disgusted with myself that I didn’t do the same thing!
😂
Amazing writing. Quite worth the read.
Thought provoking philosophy + practical considerations of building a business and a better internet for all with the Trust Assembly has made you one of my favorite Substacks.
Some people are trapped in endless philosophical circles without any meaningful application to life. Others have the opposite problem and don't consider that there might be so much more. It's very rare that there's someone who's able to do both, and rarer still to share it with the rest of us.
Thanks Sol. Hopefully we’re able to make an actual impact at some point.
This rules (of course); I suspect a large number of us have thoughts in this domain —including people smarter / more rigorous / more credentialed, who decline to share them for reasons of reputational concern— and I think it's useful to share them, especially for people who might not naturally feel "justified" thinking this way.
If I have any arguments, it's that I don't think there's any discontinuity in Scott's development as you suggest. The fact that you can describe it demonstrates this; a river is *not* a stable shape to you! You are already aware of, and processing, it in the way you describe; that you can also see it as a stable shape is an option available to him, too: a reduction, a metaphorization, a means of allocating attention. More generally, your descriptions constitute "the same thing" as Scott's abilities: you can imagine whatever you want (if you've learned about it), from the view from your doorbell to the evolution of the solar system. Whether it's based on "real time collected data" or "your models of these things" seems not to entail a major difference in consciousness or mind. I guess we'll find out, but Some Guy: you're in many places at once right now!
If he has "more" of that, it's not different between the delta between you now and you at a much younger age, when you couldn't imagine so much, couldn't quickly reduce or process or model so much. It's just more, and this isn't a new kind or way of being. If you saw radiation beyond the visible spectrum, there's no reason to think it would be more significant than "someone who is colorblind" —or even blind!— as opposed to someone who isn't: not that enormous a difference in terms of consciousness or mind, either, oddly (very oddly, I'd say).
I think this is generally true of a lot of these ideas: "Scott created an organic chemistry deep learning model and incorporated that into his brain. He can see a virus or bacteria and cure it, no problem. He can tell the side-effects of his cure. Snap. Every criminal is followed by a drone that serves the purpose of a decentralized prison and therapist."
You can already do this: we know how to kill every virus or bacteria! Just make a nanorobot that targets its shape or DNA or whatever. We don't know how to build those robots, or power them, but that's not a function of speed or single-origin knowledge in a way that would help this Scott, either; distributed-minds-Scott maybe could do it, but I'm not sure really (this is something I'm not coherent about, though). And you have already described the drone system that could end a lot of crime! Again: what's he got that you ain't got?!
I thought the issue of time was persuasive, though: that changing how time feels (based on changing how much is modeled or experienced... if that's possible, which I'm not sure of) would change mind / consciousness. And everything that followed this section ripped IMO! But I do not really believe in a "higher mind from data or speed"; I think we're universal now, outsource to computers much of what we want, etc., without it changing the situation that dramatically.
But fuck yeah to the entire back-half man, and extremely fun to read, of course!
I believe about 75% of the first part but left out the complicating stuff to get to the second part (and Amanda told me I just needed to write it so I didn’t get to write about morality in the multiverse). For one, I agree with you on the universality of the human mind. In theory. But in practice if you are moving 1,000,000x as fast, you are still a moral agent but for practical reasons you’ve started to schism away from meaningful contact. Keep extending what you know and it’s a bit like talking to someone from Sentinel island. He’s a person and he matters but he also eats people and to explain all the steps to him from “it’s okay to eat people” to “definitely never eat anyone” would take a long time and you’d have to establish a whole new way of communicating. Keep pushing that up and up and it just gets harder. For another, I actually think you’d go nuts if you didn’t have other minds of similar processing speed, depth, and shape as yours. You can’t have one Metatron. He has to have other Metatrons out there he has trouble modeling or predicting to keep him haven’t reflective communication, without which I think he would cease to be sapient. But yes, for all that, a guy. A guy you could communicate with if you did the right things. If I had a big memory and watched atoms collide for a trillion years, I’d be good at chemistry too.
This is the sort of content I was looking forward to when I came to Substack. Thank you for this piece - I’ve skimmed it and now need to go back and reread.
This is a true weirdo piece and I didn’t even talk about retrieving the idea of the greatest good from the multiverse.
I'm not sure I'm buying this description of an enhanced human brain. One thing about vision is that you simply see one specific spot in your field of vision. We can't Focus on near and far at the same time. At best, part of that vision will be peripheral and blurry, and only some gross change will attract your consciousness. The minute you can be equally focused on near and far, you have abandoned the single consciousness that our brains are capable of.
To give an extreme analogy, I was walking down a train track deep in rumination. Eventually, I heard a blaring train horn. Not sure how close the train was to me—this happened about 20 years ago— but it was too damn close. I was focused on my thoughts and nothing else.
I think what you’re saying is true and scales even up to super-giant minds. However, I also think that if you keep it at the human scale you’re missing something. You can have “focus” in a much bigger mind that encompasses much more than the total sum of all of a person’s focused and unfocused perceptions. If you have the ability to rapidly view all the cells in an organism at the same time another sensor is looking at the whole organism, then your “brain” just needs a way to stitch those two pictures together. We could never do this even if we have the best eyes in the universe. We’d need a bigger brain to make use of all the information.
I still think the conscious human mind can only have one focus at a time. What is also true is that there are unconscious processes that can function at the same time as the conscious process and occasionally emerge, fully formed and seemingly out of nowhere.
I agree one point of “focus” per conscious agent in a system. I just think that focus could be radically expanded.
I just think that the single focus structure of the conscious mind is so fundamental to the mammalian brain that the minute you can have 2 foci you have left the realm of the mammal brain and stopped being human. I notice my cat is 100 percent occupied with x until she hears a strange noise and then she's 100 percent occupied with that.
If you told me that this human brain of the future could be processing a complex reality unconsciously and then alerted the conscious brain when something worth attending to showed up, then I'd say that was still a human brain having a human experience.
Agreed but I think you can have that deepened and still one type of focus. When a bat uses echolocation I don’t think it tries to juggle sight and sound. I think it’s just a different sense. That’s how I think the experience would work.
My assumption for a bat is that one of those senses is conscious and the other one is processed unconsciously. To further speculate, I would say whatever needs to happen the fastest is handled unconsciously. Bats echolocate to avoid flying into obstacles. A split-second process. Bat's reputedly can't see very well.
Take the example of walking, chewing gum, and having a conversation at the same time. The mental processes that make walking and chewing gum possible are unconscious, while conversation is handled by a conscious process.
There is a psychological theory out there that says the mind is enormously self-censoring. We actually see everything, but our brains filter out most of it. Under hypnosis, people can often remember details of past events that were not noticed consciously at the time. There are also rare individuals with hyper memories who can literally tell you what they had for breakfast on April 14, 2023.
The fundamental difference between you and me is that I simply cannot imagine multifocal mammalian consciousness.
It boils down to the fact that I cannot imagine a multifocal mammalian consciousness and you can.
Wow. Big thoughts that leave me with big thoughts. There's much work to be done.
This is the most “off brand” one I’ve posted in a bit so thanks for sticking with it.
It held my attention. My mind only wandered once and that is high praise going on the number of "big" essays I have saved, half read.
Phew! It occurs to me that you're prepping to come back in your next life as a quantum space Jesuit.
Alas, 1/2 of that went over my head, but sure, why not!
I have spent a weird amount of my life thinking about this.
GREAT SCOTT❗️
( You’re probably too young to have heard that exclamation previously. Hint : You’ve fielded all your own questions for a win. Generally speaking.)
Good message❗️
I’m 39! I have definitely heard Great Scott. I may use that when I return to this thought experiment.
Hey,
This is my favorite thing you've written since I've got into your writing from your "Anti-Majestic Cosmic Horseshit" post.
Thanks. I have a feeling you might be a rare breed.
Now throw in Effective Altruism.
I only care about shrimp insofar as I think it’s psychically damaging to humans to hurt something when minimal intervention would hurt it less.
This is my hot take.
I often use texture as a metaphor to do some of the same things you're doing with 'deepness'
Missed opportunity. You could have invoked the scone of stone in the identity section.
I considered it!