PsychedelicEagle

Frequently using social media is the recipe for a tormented mind. The algorithm will suck your soul and transform it in fuel for Zuckerberg's mega-yacht. It's like alcohol, there is no healthy dose for it; anything above zero starts to be harmful. The only way to use it safely is if you could completely control what is shown to you. Still possible in websites like YouTube if you block the home page and other recommendations. Using instagram on your phone is the opposite of control.

Same here. I only use it on the laptop, and I have custom TamperMonkey scripts to prevent the explore page from running, and the home page from showing anything (whenever I open instagram it's an empty page — which prevent the algorithm from distracting me). I can then see messages without seeing any post or content.

It seems you're afraid of working hard. Whatever path you choose, change your mindset and realize that without deep commitment and effort you won't get anywhere. Reframe yourself as a hard worker and you will see your life transform. Expect to give everything you can before any return comes back your way. Expect the path will be tough. This mindset will bulletproof you from excuses, fears, and procrastination.

Everything that's worth is hard. What's easy is not worth it.

@OBEler Thanks for the reference. Following my post above, I'd argue the parts I highlighted in bold above are limiting factors. World models are still symbolic and represented as logical rules, exhibiting the limitations I pointed out before.

Haha +1, and I work with software engineering. LLMs are great but they can't do robust software architecture yet. (even in the symbolic/discrete space that coding is)

If that was the case, we'd see good performance on benchmarks such as https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09678v2

They can. In fact, they work quite well for many tasks without a world model, especially the ones involving symbol manipulation such as code and parts of math like algebra. But the gap still exists from the intelligence humans exhibit in that humans have an internal physical model of how the world works and they use it to make internal simulations and take actions (planning). When I lift a glass full of water, I have an internal model that predicts how the water will flow depending on the movements I make. I can even visualize it in my mind's eye (prediction). This prediction is continuous, and it captures nuances missed if we were to use only language to model it. If LLMs don't have this internal world model, they can only plan in token space — fragments of language — a representation that fails to capture the nuances of real world. Even if you say LLMs learn an implicit world model from text, it's still a text-learned model. Nonduality points that language carves the world into discrete categories, reality doesn't respect those cuts, and a text-learned world model inherits the cuts.

Great post. About unfalsifiable falsehoods: can we use Occam's Razor to filter out most of them? What they all seem to have in common is that they add variables with zero explanatory return. Also, and very interestingly (Claude made me aware of this): (speaking of unfalsiable falsehoods such as "Last Thursdayism": the universe was created recently with all fossils, memories, and light-in-transit pre-arranged. Every piece of evidence is consistent with it by design)

@OBEler, can you share references?

If you reduce consciousness to the qualia states humans experience (which is usually what humans care about, hence why some of them are able to relate to animals), then by definition animals exhibit states of consciousness closer to humans than plants. You could then assign an arbitrary value to the conciousness level of that being relative to that of human beings, and use it to compute the expected value of an action. Interesting question you could then try to estimate a "consciousness lost value" by multiplying the number of individuals below by their assigned value: To obtain 100 g of protein, how many individual organisms are consumed in each case—soybean plants if the source is soy, and cattle if the source is beef?

I'm watching this more recent interview now; he brings up the "world model" point again right in the beginning. Edit: Interesting quote:

@OBEler Yann LeCun's arguments make sense to me. The one that stands out most: LLMs have no world model grounded in interaction with reality; they learn a probability distribution over sequences of tokens — fragments of written language. Since their only training signal is text, they have no ultimate grounding in physical or sensory experience. From from section 8.2.2 of this paper: One can argue against this, but I intuit it's a crucial limitation, and reaching AGI will require different architectures. I do believe AGI is attainable, but it will take longer and a different paradigm than the one the industry is obsessed with right now. PS: I'm not making the case that we're necessarily in an "AI bubble". I believe the value of AI is not tied to attaining AGI.

Stating LLMs are AGI misses the fundamental gaps LLMs have. Not being AGI does not mean they aren't extremely useful, however.

Hahaha. What made the breakthrough from 100% to 101%? Less than 80% I'd say. Still got a lot of contemplation, self inquiry, and generally spiritual work to do. Among many of my psychedelic trips, two I consider awakenings, but after coming back from them my worldview and self identity remained similar to before. In parallel, I'm working on solidifying myself into stage yellow, which requires a lot of systems thinking — a bit orthogonal to spirituality in my eyes but hopefully indirectly building a base for later spiritual growth. Any advice is welcome.

Only with friends or people who I deem Pluralists or beyond (or Stage Green and beyond, for SD). Otherwise it's just a waste of time; they won't be able to understand where you're coming from, or the significance of it.

@Cocolove Sorry for your loss, and thanks for sharing. Also curious to learn about this.

I often use AI to brainstorm, but I wrote the post myself. I deliberately use ; and — in my writing. Sure, I'm not saying you're below or above such points, just providing some leverage points. These are often dynamic depending on your life stage. I still find myself craving sex or female companionship at times, but at a much lower frequency and intensity than before I "solidified" myself into post-conventional stages. Only recently some of these perspectives made into what seems the emotional layer of my self, changing my experience (how I feel) and behavior. The example I gave with moving into post-conventional happened to me personally.

Romantic relationships are more likely to be perceived as scarce, uncertain, and irreplaceable — all of which drive approval seeking. Change those and approval seeking drops: Reduce scarcity — widen your social networks; reframe dating as a numbers game; Reduce uncertainty — experience is king; past successes reinforce your intrinsic worth; Reduce irreplaceability — expand your sources of meaning and identity: develop principles, competence, build a community. One example of expanding meaning and identity: achieving post-conventional levels of ego development enables realization that 80% of the population is conventional, valuing what they were socially-programmed to. From there, you can internalize it's silly to let your self worth be defined for such people, which frees you up, making you less needy.

Never take a pink pill: https://www.ukat.co.uk/blog/society/pink-cocaine-what-is-it/

Hahahaha exactly.

Nice, you mean during your therapy sessions? What psychedelics are you taking?

If I had to choose between my job and realizing God, my boss would never see my face again. Edit: so obvious decision I don't even know why I even wrote it

Hahahaha

Thanks, already on my watch list. And cheers on the fast green -> yellow transition! Do you think most 'gains' came from learnings from this channel? What other sources or practices have you used?