aurum

Stupidity. There is nothing that functions in modern society without the government. Even your ability to take personal responsibility for your life requires a highly effective State. This idea that you shouldn’t depend on the public sector is both impossible and hypocritical. Right-wingers depend on the government every second of their life. Of course, there is a limit. You cannot and should not depend on the government for everything. Some balance must be struck. But a lot of right-wingers are in denial of how badly we need government.

There is a need for progressive economics policies. Progressives are correct that the middle class is getting hallowed out. This is not healthy for the overall system. Too much wealth polarization creates absurdities and instability. That said, I don’t think a socialist utopia where everyone is completely financially equal is a worth while goal. Some degree of wealth inequality is going to be inevitable and probably beneficial. What we should be concerned with is: 1) Raising the overall standards of living 2) Raising people’s economic ability to pursue higher consciousness pursuits 3) Constantly maintaining balance in the system so the distribution of wealth doesn’t polarize too much to either extreme (inequality or equality)

Both lens are correct, and they’re both incomplete. Yes, we have a degree of individual autonomy in our lives. And, we also are massively influenced by our environment, upbringing, etc. The problem I see is when people get dogmatic about either of these perspectives. In America, you actually do have quite a lot of individual autonomy to shape your destiny relative to other parts of the world. But at the same time there is also corruption and racism and trauma and geography and general rigging of the system. So everyone’s situation will be different. The question for me is whether or not your perspective is adaptive or maladaptive to the situation you are in.

I just came across this video of Bryan Johnson, current world record-holder in the anti-aging community and millionaire CEO. I thought a discussion of his protocol and the future of health & wellness would be fun. What are the collective pros of what Bryan is doing? What are the downsides? And how does it relate to the themes of Actualized.org? Here is a quick list that I came up with: Possible Pros 1. Data driven health & wellness can disrupt biased, human opinionated health & wellness. No longer do we have to debate about whether vegan or carnivore is superior. As technology improves, we can have access to real-time data about our health like never before. Everything can be tested and measured for effectiveness. This was not possible without modern technology, which is why no one has ever done it. We are entering a new golden age of biofeedback. 2. Bryan is helping to change our collective beliefs about aging and rejuvenation. What was once inevitable effects of aging may no longer be the case. 3. Bryan is providing his protocols to the general public, therefore helping to increase public health. Healthier people are more likely to seek out self-actualized and be interested in Tier 2 values & needs 4. We are being shown the power of team-based health and wellness. Most people try to solve their health problems either by themselves or with just a few professionals. What happens when someone has an entire team dedicated to their wellness? What if everyone had accessed to such a team, or at least close to it? 5. Mental health benefits seem to be correlated for Bryan with this protocol. So this is about more than the physical body, it's about happiness Possible Critiques 1. We are becoming obsessed with data and losing our natural intuition about our own bodies. What ever happened to eat when hungry, sleep when tired, drink when thirsty? Why are we making health so complicated? 2. Bryan is only able to accomplish what he is doing because he has accrued vast financial resources that 99.9% of people never will 3. What is the purpose of anti-aging or health & wellness if it takes this much effort to accomplish? Is this level of health even functionally necessary? Might we be better off spending less time on our health and more time actually living our life? 4. This is advanced survival, which ultimately is a distraction from deeper spiritual contemplation and pursuits 5. This promotes surrendering your own authority around your health to experts, science and research which may be flawed Thoughts?

No. I am not saying our environment is not polluted with toxics to some degree. It definitely is. But the situation is not nearly as bad as you are making it out to be. Immortality is not natural at all. It is highly unnatural to how all species have evolved. To achieve physical immortality would require something beyond what is considered natural. Cleaning up the environment is grossly insufficient for immortality. As far as breatharianism, I don’t deny that such a thing could be possible. There are people like Ray Maor who may have an ability to eat very little food. But that does not mean it’s optimal for anti-aging, or that you will be able to do the same, even with a clean environment and training.

It’s more complex than that.

Amazing. What was your doses, < 10mg?

Can you say more about this? Currently also experiencing some vision issues and have been curious if psychedelics can help. My thinking is that the eyes and brain are so deeply connected that there may be some healing potential there. But I’ve seen almost no research or even anecdotes about this so far.

@Giulio Bevilacqua I've not done 5Me0. It could help. But from what I've read about it, a breakthrough dose sounds like overkill. If your primary intention is to heal muscle tension, you're probably better off just getting some bodywork done.

Sometimes he says some New Age stuff that causes me to raise an eyebrow. But many of the takes I’ve seen from him are very solid. Regardless, Bashar is just a jumping off point. This conversation is really not about him.

@Husseinisdoingfine realistically, you will not succeed at not feeling FOMO. It’s human nature to compare ourselves to others. You would need far more maturity, wisdom and perspective to truly no longer care about your friend’s success. You’re not in a place where that’s real for you. What’s real for you is that having a fun college experience and getting into a good university is very important. And your friend’s success is rubbing salt in the wound. That’s fine. Justified or not, that’s where you are at. And so I wouldn’t try to not feel how you feel. Instead, ask yourself: how is this contributing to my sense of self-awareness of what I want? What is my jealousy pointing me to that’s real? And how can I move in the direction of that?

It doesn’t work like that in my experience. It’s more accurate to say that young liberals today will continue to vote for similar policies when they are 45 that they believe in currently. They are not suddenly going to become Republicans in the way we think about Republicans right now.

So my favorite book on Enlightenment has been Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damndest Thing by Jed McKenna. In it he describes a technique for reaching Enlightenment called "spiritual autolysis". To quote the book: "Here's all you need to know to become enlightened: Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what's true until you know. That's it. That's the whole deal - a complete teaching of enlightenment, a complete practice. If you ever have any questions or problems - no matter what the question or problem is - the answer is always exactly the same: Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what's true until you know." He goes onto explain that therefore the process of Spiritual Autolysis is to attempt to write the Truth. Pick any belief you have, write it down, and then rewrite it in till it's True. Not truthish, but True. I've been experimenting with this for a little bit and I think it's brilliant. Goes right along with what Leo was saying in "All Humanity's Knowledge" video about destroying you knowledge graph and seeing what's left. Because you'll never be able to write the Truth. Anyone else use this technique? Curious what other people's experiences have been. As much as I like meditation I don't find it direct enough in terms of achieving Enlightenment, although I do still practice it.

@sleep I'm going to second this. Sure, spiritual work could help with your healing. There is a correlation there. But you don't need the deepest level of awakenings to get off psychiatric treatment. And in fact it could backfire badly on you. Your mood issues are likely far more basic. Things like nutrition, mindfulness, bodywork, sauna, exercise, breathwork, sauna, cold showers, sunlight, friends + community, a meaningful career, etc. If you want a spiritual practice, you could look into Vipassana meditation. But be careful about biting off more than you can chew.

I’m not against a pause if developers really think it will make a difference. However, I question whether or not a pause is politically / economically feasible to enact. You have to actually be able to enforce such a decision not only domestically but internationally. In theory, we could just “pause” nuclear weapons. But in reality that doesn’t work either. We keep building them as well. Second question: will we be able to solve these problems in six months? Will we be confident enough at that point to say a future AGI won’t eat us alive? How will we know? What test can be run?

AI is going to usher in a whole new wave of doing crime, similar to the internet. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

I disagree. It’s going to take time for anyone to build and train a superhuman, psychopathic AI. It’s possible the FBI and other law enforcement agencies could stop it before that was completed. Especially if the authorities themselves are using an already functional AI. What I outlined is preventative. It wasn’t meant to be a solution to stop an already existing, rampaging AI. So what is your solution? If you are suggesting pausing or shutting down AI, how would you accomplish that? Because all it shows is that AI will likely be interested in survival / self-preservation / goal preservation. IMO it’s possible for AI to have all those things and not seek to wipe out humanity.

I checked out both videos. Neither one reasonably proves the point of the Time article.

Foreign state is harder. To the degree the US can’t play world police, it would have to rely on each countries own internal version of these resources. Given that a sufficiently powerful / psychopathic AI could pose an threat to global security, this is also a good case for more global unification. We need international organizations that can coordinate easily on handling these things. For now, I think we have some good natural barriers to entry working in our favor. The countries that have the least capacity to monitor a psychopathic AI are the same countries that will struggle to create one. And the countries that have the best capacity to build that AI also have the best capacity to monitor it. That knife cuts both ways. But that barrier to entry won’t last forever, the same way the nuclear bomb barrier to entry didn’t last forever. So there may be outliers that need to be accounted for. We don’t want an undeveloped country getting a hold of tech it really shouldn’t have and can’t control.

The point is the AI could be used for nefarious means and we are talking about preventing such things. Russia is just an example. Let’s assume that’s possible, and that people exist who have both the motivation and capacity to do so. One piece of the solution could be turning this over to the FBI / CIA. We already have teams at these places that monitor for potential terrorist threats, coups, nuclear weapons building, political assassination attempts, etc. Building a psychopathic AI would need to be added to that list. In the future, there may be raids on AI learning labs in the same way there are raids on drug labs. Also, anyone seeking to build an AI should not automatically be fear and clear to do so. There need to be permits, inspections, licenses beyond simple Intellectual Property laws. Similar to how we treat building a physical building. Ironically we may be able to use an obedient AI to monitor for potential rogue, psychopathic AIs. If someone is truly determined to build a dangerous AI, they may be able to skirt these safeguards. Terrorists still succeed on rare occasion. But this would be a good start.

That’s definitely a problem. Obviously people can use AI for nefarious means. There are criminals using GPT-4 right now to advance their criminal agenda. So certainly there needs to be due diligence, humans laws, regulation etc. What exactly that looks like, I don’t know. However, if the AI is still obedient to Putin, then it’s obviously still within human control. It’s not some vast superintelligence running circles around humanity as it seeks to wipe us all off the face of the planet. Which is what the author of that Time article was talking about. Even Putin does not want such a thing.

Follow up to my previous post in this thread. I found this video of Bashar talking about A.I: In it, Bashar essentially argues that the end goal for A.I is to be a physical representation of our Higher Mind, which in this case I would call our God Mind. Further more, he argues A.I will not simply just go against what is best for humanity. Such a decision would not actually be intelligent. You can find further small clips of Bashar talking on this topic with a quick search on YT. I think his perspective could be a bit overly optimistic. "What is best for humanity" could be interpreted in many different ways, ways that we might not actually like. Nonetheless, I feel it confirms some of the earlier suspicions I wrote about ITT. This whole idea that a SuperIntelligent A.I would automatically be interested in harming humanity is highly suspect. You cannot just assume this at all. Of course I also don't think humanity should be reckless and just go on mindlessly building AI. There will be all sorts of challenges created by A.I even if it is perfectly on our side. Due diligence needs to be done. If that means a temporary pause while we figure somethings out, I have no problem with that. However, I'm not buying the panic on this one. I don't think you can claim you know, within reasonable probability, that A.I will be dangerous. It's an unsupported conclusion at this point. You could fire back that I also don't know that A.I won't be dangerous, thus it's wiser to take a cautious route. But there are also costs to taking the cautious route. The longer you spend being cautious over a potentially imaginary fear, the longer it takes for humanity to develop a SuperIntelligence that could help solve many of our problems that we actually know exist. Realistically we need an intelligent balance of caution and forward progress as we navigate this new terrain. I don't think shutting down the whole thing is the answer.

Read the article Leo posted. It certainly seems like risk management is not being taken seriously enough on AI. Multipolar traps may be the end of us all in this case. Companies and nations all fighting to win the AI race creates an incentive to slash concerns of future catastrophe. I think this is the author’s strongest point. My biggest critique is that he doesn’t clearly show a link between how superhuman AI automatically leads to AI wanting to kill us all. He seems to assume it’s a given that superhuman AI = death of humanity. That may be possible, but I don’t necessarily buy his chain of causation. It’s more plausible to me that such an intelligence would not be interested in wiping out humanity. Nor is it clear to me how it would even be able to do so if it wanted. Destroying all of humanity is no joke.

It’s amazing how fast some of you guys are assuming you already understand alien intelligence.

I have many more questions, but I think I’ll leave it there for now. Wait for the course. Encouraging, thank you. Assuming you are correct about all this, I actually find this exciting. It means our collective understanding of God and spirituality is continuing to evolve. It’s not just a static, timeless Truth that humans have completely understood 5,000 years ago. This would be the cutting edge.