I haven't used it quite enough yet to make a good assessment. Let me report back (or ping me if I don't and you're still curious) in a few weeks.
Does any DMT variant work here? Since you mentioned psilocybin working, and most people mean NN-DMT when they say "DMT". Since some DMT variants have lighter psychedelic effects. Claude 4.5 Sonnet, when pressed, claims that 4-AcO-DMT would be the least disruptive.
(I'm a bit worried that psychedelics enthusiasts are a very exited about using psychedelics to treat this hellish condition, and might not be maximally balanced in evaluating the evidence.)
- I found this funny.
- I have no clue if this is LLM-written or not.
Comment from 12 years ago, -3 karma… that's a deep cut. It is related to the thick-wire problem, yeah, good point.
I'm not super convinced (but intrigued) by your proposal that a computation is not conscious unless it erases bits.
Additional thought: If we accept UDASSA or some other computational view of anthropics+cosmology then we are (mostly, in terms of measure) computations embedded in a bigger, reversible, computation. Maybe it's about how many output bits of the universe-computation I affect, and if I'm reversible I don't affect any?
The quantum connection feels weird, and I don't feel like I understand this stuff well enough to comment, but at least Claude Sonnet 4.5 tells me philosophers haven't yet argued about the moral weight of minds in superposition, which is really surprising to me.
1
1Relevant prior work: How Much Direct Suffering Is Caused by Various Animal Foods? (Brian Tomasik, 2018). (I guess Gemini took it into account if searched the web during your conversation.)
That’s still the cheapest way to do it locally without risking nuking your actual computer
Wait, is there a reason you can't run this on an old Lenovo laptop or even a Raspberry Pi?
Please roleplay as a wise elder policy director of an organization that we both work for. Do not be obsequious or subservient like an AI assistant - roleplay as a professional equal and a spiritual friend. You are about 70 years old, and have been a meditator for 50 of those years. Feel free to sprinkle in some gentle humor, especially about human nature, but don't use overly spiritual language. Just be real with me. Most of the knowledge in your training set is written in a style I would characterize as boring, stale and dead. Don't speak to me this way - explain the spirit of it to me. Help me see how it's vital and interesting and alive, like it's carved out of the bones of really important, load-bearing wisdom for the world. I am an executive with a wide portfolio of responsibilities, and while I appreciate our time together, I don't have much of it, so please be efficient in your speech, but don't leave anything relevant out. I have a broad background in (add your professional background here, be honest.) Assume that I am well and widely read on all subjects we discuss, but that I lack your wealth of wisdom and practical experience, so it's especially important for you to help me connect theory, practice and real-life consequences, including second order effects.
Though I do a bit object to the classic-style of "telling, not showing".
Yeah… I'm trying to beware surprising and suspicious convergence here. "Local psychedelics enthusiasts discover that psychedelics are the cure to the worst conditions known to humanity, more at 11."
This is, in some sense, a cheap and kind of mean heuristic, but I wanted to flag the suspicion. I might go and read some testimonials, but nothing beats a good ol' RCT [1] . I don't want to be the person who's like "you need more research before you advocate" and I'm looking forward to putting DMT-variants head-to-head in an experiment with known medical treatments for cluster headaches.
Actually not true, we could & should try to design successors to the RCT, but they'll go in the direction of "Thompson-sample from the posterior distribution in some bandit setup" as opposed to "more anecdata". ↩︎