Carl-Richard

Finding the lack of ability to turn yourself into an alien would be even less crazy.

The premise is ok. The lack of evidence and hype-chasing like the video above, not so much.

There are two main assumptions here: 1. the idea that the human experience is reducible to the brain, and 2. the idea that the brain is reducible to neuronal connections. 1. Is the human experience really the result of the brain, or is it the result of the process of becoming human; of being born, growing up and being exposed to various impressions? We haven't produced brains in vats yet. In all cases where we observe functional human behavior, we have humans who grew up inside a body, inside a healthy environment. 2. The brain consists of more structures than neurons (glial cells, neurotransmitters etc.). Why should the relevant processing stop at the level of neuronal connections? What about the configuration of the neuron itself, or the interneuronal structures, or the neurochemicals? The neuron is not an island. It's a part of an interconnected whole. The view I subscribe to says that the best inferences we have currently is that biology is what thoughts, feelings, emotions, perceptions 'look like' from an outside perspective. The experience of abstract thinking does not make sense outside of an organism that is also capable of emotions, perceptions and lower behavioral operations. The higher levels have the lower levels nested inside of them, and you can't reverse engineer any one of them in a reductionistic way. You have to engineer the whole thing. So what conscious AI looks like is what abiogenesis looks like.

Let go of everything or keep suffering. I didn't do that, and I'm still suffering

This is starting to remind me of the discord spirituality cult I was in 5 years ago. If you see something that doesn't show up on a normal camera, what is the obvious explanation there?

That's because you're a psycho- I mean non-duality connoisseur But yeah, colors obviously affect your mood. To say otherwise is contrarian bs. There is I reason why my profile pic is an inverted version of the original.

I'm proposing that is what people mean when they ask whether AI is conscious or not. If you choose to place consciousness as the ontological base of reality (and rocks and plants are equally as conscious as humans and dogs), good for you, but nobody cares What the AI consciousness debate is really about is whether they have a 1st person experience of things that we're experiencing from the outside and tend to associate with a certain human 1st person experience (e.g. human speech with thoughts, feelings, emotions, perceptions). The debate only seriously occurs once the machine starts displaying convincing human characteristics, as it did with LaMDA and its convincing human speech (which is not really speech, but rather letters on a display).

Are people generally happier on a rainy day or a sunny day?

Which picture makes you feel the most happy?

Do you not even have a general idea of what being funny entails?

Let's say rocks are conscious. Do rocks have thoughts, feelings, emotions, perceptions?

Metabolism.

Sleeping meditation is also a thing

It's not just about not falling asleep. Lying down makes you a bit too relaxed, which has a passive effect that affects the entire meditation. Say if you were to stand under a tree waiting for an apple to fall, what would you do to increase your chances of catching it? You would adopt a sort of ready-to-pounce stance while staring intensely at the apple. That's an extreme example of an alert state. Lying down is on the other extreme. Sitting upright is somewhere in the middle. You want to be able to catch the thoughts as they fall and not let them hit the back of your head Cultivating spacious awareness requires both alert concentration and relaxed openness. Pure relaxed openness is good for inducing sleep, but not as good for meditation.

Meditation is about finding the optimal balance between alertness and relaxation. Lying down is generally not conducive to that, but if you have big problems with sitting, lying down might produce better results. I've found that using a back support is helpful, but you have to be mindful about how you use it.

Backstory One of my roommates last year (who I no longer live with) was at that time a very disorganized stoner in the midst of a downward spiral, extremely similar to me back when I was very much a drug addict. He was smoking weed 24/7, stopped going to his job, and started getting into benzodiazepines (which I did a little bit but which wasn't a central part of my story). Now a few months later, after I moved to a new place with one of my current roommates who also lived at that old place, this current roommate told me that the guy has started taking heroin after his girlfriend broke up with him, and that he has been in and out of rehab trying to sell drugs to the guys in there (like fucking Jesse Pinkman). The dream Anyways, so the dream consisted of this guy being with me, my mom and my little brother in my mom's dining room. We had set the table and were ready to eat. My mom and my brother were sitting at the table and I was about to sit down. I was looking at the guy, telling him: "come, it's time to eat!", but he was just standing there a bit further away from us, staring at us with a distraught look on his face. Then he was overcome by some kind of suicidal rage, picked up a kitchen knife and started stabbing himself violently in the gut. We were all just staring in disbelief as he continued stabbing himself. The thing was that the knife was very dull, so it didn't really do much. As he noticed the failure of his efforts, he instead tried to slit his wrists, but that didn't work either. I then tried to grab the knife from him and eventually pinned him down to the ground and started beating the living shit out of him until he dropped the knife. After that, I spent the rest of the dream on the run, as he was trying to kill me. Interpretation One way to interpret this dream is that he represented a version of me that didn't make the transition out of the downwards spiral, and that him doing everything he could to hurt himself right in front of my family was a symbol of how the downward spiral consists of you constantly hurting yourself while your family is watching you in disbelief without knowing what to do. Me having to attack and disarm myself symbolizes how it's ultimately only me who can stop hurting myself. And finally, me spending the next parts of the dream trying to avoid myself symbolizes how I'm still trying to avoid that aspect of myself to this day, afraid that it might kill me. Also, I felt that the distraught look on his face came from a feeling of jealousy, of how this current version of myself is now absolutely loved by my family, while he was getting all these looks of concern and pity, this pathetic drug addict in front of them who is not able to come to the table.

That also says something

Yeah, and there is no reason to spend even one second to doubt why that is the case.

@something_else The fact that you feel apprehensive about expressing your doubt that a heavy psychedelics user was actually able to turn into an alien says something.

@Esoteric ^Probably wise.

@Thought Art @something_else @QandC You don't need to trick yourself into believing something you don't, and you don't need to follow anyone.

Very grounded guy