Nor is this process about reality (as many delusional Buddhists seem to insist), but more like choosing to run a different OS on ones hardware. 

(I kind of wanted to give some nuance on the reality part from the OS Swapping perspective. You're of course right with some overzealous people believing they've found god and similar but I think there's more nuance here)

If we instead take your perspective of OS swap I would say it is a bit like switching from Windows to Linux because you get less bloatware. To be more precise one of the main parts of the swap is the lessening of the entrenchments of your existing priors. It's gonna take you a while to set up a good distro but you will be less deluded as a consequence and also closer to "reality" if reality is the ability to see what happens with the underlying bits in the system. As a consequence you can choose from more models and you start interpreting things more in real time and thus you're closer to reality, what is happening now rather than the story of your last 5 years.

Finally on the pain of the swap, there are also more gradual forms of this, you can try out Ubuntu (mindfulness, loving kindness) before switching over. Seeing through your existing stories can happen in degrees, you don't have to become enlightened to enjoy the benefits?

Also, I think that terminology can lead to specific induced states as it primes your mind for certain things. 

One of the annoying things with meditation is of course that there's n=1 primary experience that makes it hard to talk about yet from my perspective it seems a bit like insight cycling, dark night of the soul and the hell realms are something that can be related to a hyperstition or a specific way of practicing? 

If you for example follow thai-forest tradition, mahamudra or dzogchen (potentially advaita though less certain) it seems that insights along those lines are more a consequence of not having established a strong enough 1 to 1 correspondence with loving awareness before doing intense concentration meditation? (Experience has always been happening, yet the basis for that experience might be different.)

It is a bit like the difference between dissolving into a warm open bath or a warm embrace or hug of the world versus seeing through the world to an abyss where there is no ground. That groundlessness seems to be shaped by what is there to meet it and so I'm a bit worried about the temporal cycling language as it seems to predicate a path on what has no ground? 

I don't really have a good solution here as people seem to be going through those sort of experiences that you're talking about and it isn't like I've not gotten depressive episodes after longer meditation epxperiences either. Yet I don't know if I would call it a dark night of the soul for it implies a necessity of personation with the suffering and that is not what is primary? Language is a prior for experience and so I would just use different language myself but whatever.

Man I'm noticing this is hard to put into words, hopefully some of it made sense and I appreciate the effort for a more standardised cybernetic basis to talk about these things through.

dissolution of desire. An altered trait where your brain's reinforcement learning algorithm is no longer abstracted into desire-as-suffering.

Would you analogize this term to the insights of "dukkha"? I find an important thing here to be the equal taste of joy and sorrow from the perspective of dukkha and so it might be worth emphasising? (maybe I'm off with that though.)

Here's an extension of what you said in terms of dullness and sharpness within attention based practices. (Partly to check that I understand)

Dullness = subcriticality and distance in cascading below the criticality line

Monkey mind = supercriticality and cascading above the criticality line (activates for whatever shows up)

If we look at the 10 stages of TMI (9-stage Elephant path), the progression goes something like distracted mind -> subcriticality (stage 2-3) -> practices to increase cascading of brain (4-5) -> practices for the attention to calibrate around the criticality line (6-10)

Also this is why the tip to meet your meditation freshly wherever it is appearing is important because it is a criticality tuning process that is different for everyone? 

(I very much like this way of thinking about this, nice!)

Based on a true map of the territory. (I really like this advice a good exploration strat seems similar to the one about taking photographies, it is really just about taking a bunch of them and you'll learn what works over time.)

I really appreciated this post. 

I didn't know that you had concepts for aliveness and boggling within the rationality sphere as I find these two of my most previous states that I've been cultivating over the last couple of years and they've always felt semi-orthogonal to more classic rationality (which I associate more with the betting, TDT and deep empiricism stuff).

Meditation seems to bring aliveness, boggling and focusing forth quite well and I just really appreciate that they're things you place high value on as I find them some of the best ways of getting out of pre-existent frames. (Which for me seems one of the best ways of becoming more rational)

On character alignment for LLMs.

I would like to propose that we think of a John Rawls style original position (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position) as one view when looking at character prompting for LLMs. More specifically I would want you to imagine that you're on a social network or similar and that you're put into a word with mixtures of AI and human systems, how do you program the AI in order to make the situation optimal? You're a random person among all of the people, this means that some AIs are aligned to you some are not. Most likely, the majority of AIs will be run by larger corporations since the amount of AIs will be proportional to the power you have.

How would you prompt each LLM agent? What are their important characteristics? What happens if they're thought of as "tool-aligned"?

If we're getting more internet based over time and AI systems are more human in that they can flawlessly pass the turing test, I think the veil of ignorance style thinking becomes more and more applicable.

Think more of how you would design a societly of LLMs and what if the entire society of LLMs had this alignment rather than just the individual LLM.

This is a nice way to get around the problems raised in Andrew Critch's post on consciousness as well since it is a lot less conflationary 

Adults will pre-mortem plan by thinking most of their plans will fail. They will therefore they have a dozen layers of backups and action plans prepared in advance. This is also so that other people can feel that they're safe because someone had already planned this. ("Yeah, I knew this would happen" type of vibe.)

The question would then be "How will my first 10 layers of plans go wrong and how can I take this into account?"

A quick example of this might look like this:

1. Race dynamics will happen, therefore we need controls and coordination (90%)
2. Coordination will break down therefore we need better systems (90%)
3. We will find these better systems yet they will not be implemented by default (85%)
4. We will therefore have to develop new coordination systems yet they can't be too big since they won't be implemented (80%)
5. We should therefore work on developing proven coordination systems where they empirically work and then scale them
6. (Other plan maybe around tracking compute or other governance measures)

And I've now coincidentally arrived at the same place as Audrey Tang...

But we need more layers than this because systems will fail in various more ways as well!