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It seems like you're saying "I meditated, and while at first that made sensory issues worse, eventually they just stopped."
This is accurate, though it must be understood in the appropriate context. I've been meditating for years. Then my sensory issues fixed themselves relatively suddenly, over a period of a few months. This happened after several insight cycles, and well after stream entry.
The way insight cycles work, it's like you used to be a hoarder and you're not anymore because you took to heart Marie Kondo's book. But you live in a house that's full the garbage you used to hoard. You throw out everything in the basement, and discover there's another basement below it that you'd forgotten about years ago and it's full of more garbage. Then you clean up that basement and discover there's another basement below that full of another different kind of garbage. Each process of "clean up a basement; discover another one's below it full of new, exciting garbage to throw away" is an insight cycle. This sensory issue thing was Basement #9. (The number 9 is just a guess. I don't know the exact number of basements I'm at. I've stopped counting.)
All of this garbage in the basement puts a constant low-level stress on you until you clean it up, just like real garbage in a real basement. Cleaning it up Basements #1-#8 gave me the tools and bandwidth[1] to deal with Basement #9. In this way, "dealing with my sensory disorder" constituted an insight cycle.
When you kill an emotion, you suppress it or distract yourself from it. In mystic practice, you listen to it without reinforcing it or getting tangled up in it, and it goes away on its own. Killing an emotion is like using your parasympathetic nervous system to neutralize your sympathetic nervous system. If you are able, it's healthier to let both of them shut off. To do this you need to be in an safe environment.
Listening when you're at high samatha (such as after meditation) doesn't take effort. Putting effort into things reads as strain which signals low status.
Some people do use meditation as a targeted solution to things like chronic pain. I expect this works for some people and doesn't work for others.
For me, I got these effects as a side effect of mystical insight. Is that the right course of action for you? It depends what you want. Mystic insight has lots of different effects you get as a package deal.
Not just mental bandwidth. Physical capital too, like clothes made out of bamboo-rayon. ↩︎
Is anyone else on this website making YouTube videos? Less Wrong is great, but if you want to broadcast to a larger audience, video seems like the place to be. I know Rational Animations makes videos. Is there anyone else? Are you, personally, making any?
Typo fixed.
Thank you for adding the link. I think the comments are a good place for it.
This Bene Gesserit stuff is building on top of the stuff I learned in rhetorical aikedo. I got good enough at socratic dialogue that I can put those words on autopilot and focus instead on what my interlocutor's ego is doing.
Thank you for the excellent comment.
"Dualism is used as a fundamental interpretative tool" is a good way of putting it.
"When meditating, dualism gets broken down due to lack of feedback loops and an increase in neutral annealing, leading to nondual world models" ← Also yes.
What I was trying to get at with the non-cyclic graph stuff is that if all the brain did was non-causally model an external world, then it is always possible in principle to create a simulation where sensory inputs affect the simulation unidirectionally, and information flows through the simulation itself with no cycles. This is like how our weather prediction computers do not predictably affect the weather itself, or how planetariums do not affect the movement of the stars.
Embedded world optimizers are different. Your world model affect your motor outputs which affect the physical world which affects the world model. This is a cycle. In this way, non-embedded world optimizers such as chess engines (which are effectively stateless due to Minimax) differ from embedded world optimizers such as our brains, because embedded world optimizers cause cyclic causal loops when interacting with their environment. It's basically the Time Travel Paradox problem, except without any need for time travel. Your brain makes sense of this by scribbling "free will" over a link in the chain it doesn't want to look too closely at. By pretending this link is effectively random, it simplifies what appears to be an intractable self-referential problem into what appears to be (but isn't) a tractable non-self-referential one. Meditation temporarily breaks a link in the cycle by stopping the motor outputs where you make changes to the physical external world. Without that link in the cycle, the loop is cut and the causality becomes non-cyclic [while you're meditating].
Answer A: The computational intractability is a side effect of being an embedded world optimizer 𝓪 𝓫𝓪𝓵𝓵 𝓸𝓯 𝓷𝓮𝓾𝓻𝓸𝓷𝓼 that must satisfy the conflicting optimization targets of "create a simulated world that accurately models external physical reality" and "optimize the simulated world into a desired state". The Gordian knot of computational intractability is transcended by giving up trying to be an interpretible world optimizer as defined by, say, decision theory. All those abstractions that insulate your value system from your world model? You just throw them out. The computationally intractable problem is still computationally intractable. It just stops being a problem for you, because you're not trying to solve that problem anymore.
Answer B: Awakening is not limited to therevada/Samatha. I got there via Zen, for example, which is non-Therevadan. You can even detect Awakening in non-Buddhists when you know what to look for. For example, I believe Mary Baker Eddy ended up at stream entry via Christian prayer.
Is the non-cyclic graph a way of modelling causality as state transitions?
I hope I answered your question. I'm uncertain what you're trying to ask here due to an ambiguity in the word "state". The word "state", can refer to many different things in this context, including altered states of consciousness (as distinct from altered traits), the computational concept of state (vs statelessness), and also attractors (which are similar to altered traits).
This model of dissolving the self is consistent with my experience meditating.
I like that [clickbait] isn't a pressure that I'm under.
I have never clicked on a post by jefftk and then been disappointed that it was clickbait.
Meta: I think throwing up a paper of yours is good practice here when it directly addresses the point. I link to my own blog posts in the same way all the time.
By the way, there's an edit button too, which you can use to retroactively linkify your link.
If we have ≫100% economic growth in this hypothetical economy, then it is possible for both Principle (A) [human labor price stays high] and Principle (B) [human labor price falls very low] to be satisfied simultaneously. This is possible because "high" and "low" are not absolutes. They are measured relative to the price of other goods. I am interpreting "AGI not taking over" to imply that the owners of capital remain human.
Given the continued rule of current law, human beings will continue to have value to other human beings through status games (entourages, buying poor-quality artisanal products, paying muscular dudes to sing you Happy Birthday), capital-owning rich perverts (prostitution, OnlyFans) and legal requirements (jury duty, notaries), if nothing else. This is because "being a human" has conceptual value the way Comedian is more valuable than any other banana taped to the wall. If the owners of capital care about Coherent Extrapolated Volition, then they can hire humans to use as ground truth for that too. The criterion "rule of law" does a lot of work here. If humans cannot be turned into slaves, then that puts a regulatory constraint on how little the human owners of capital can pay to keep other people around as retainers and entertainers. In this way, humans could provide value the way horses do today. Not because horses provide cheap physical labor, but because riding a horse is a fun status symbol, and because horses are lovable pets. Human corpses could even be used as a store of value to diversity against the volatility of other assets, since the production of human corpses would be limited by rule of law in a way that the transmutation of gold is not. Surely many rich people want a throne room built out of real human skulls, and not fake ones. In addition, many laws make it valuable to be a human being to e.g. file paperwork at a consulate in California. In today's 2025 world, chess tournaments are dominated by human players, despite computers being unbeatable at chess.
Meanwhile, the production of manufacturable assets like artificial sushi becomes extremely cheap.
The equilibrium is a situation where the price of human labor (measured in something like FLOPs, chocolate cake or procedurally-generated MrBeast video knockoffs) plummets, but the price of manufactured goods relative to that same reference point decreases even faster, due to lower regulatory barriers. Humans on Earth live lives that are luxurious by today's standards (exclusing industries like housing, the price of which is driven by government regulation), but insignificantly poor compared to the owners of capital, who are limited only by how close they can get to building Von Neumann probes.
The final solution to this tension between law and economics is to invent something like a Blade Runner replicant that looks and functions like a human slave, but is legally non-human property.