I personally would love to give my personal agent pocket money ($20-$30) and see what it can surprise me with[5].
Circumstances vary, but the last thing I need is MOAR STUFF arriving at my home out of the blue.
Q: Wouldn't this idea end up as an ad business once it matures?
Maturity might instead be businesses training their own AIs to advertise to the agents. The end game is people buying stuff and people selling stuff and nobody knowing why, but the AIs assure everyone they're making the best deals.
1As to the conventional intuitive self-model, like, yes, this is just an accurate description of how I and many people think about themselves prior to reading Byrnes series. Maybe you don't conceptualize yourself this way, in which case maybe you don't have the same kind of problems to deal with. It's also possible you do but are selfing so hard you can't see the model. I don't know your mind, so can't tell you.
Maybe I can convey something by taking one of Steven Byrnes's examples in that series, the perception of someone saying a word such as "smile", in section 2.3 of this post. He presents an obviously wrong account, that he claims everyone wrongly believes. I shrug and say "consciousness of abstraction". More fully, there is a whole process of how acoustic waves enter the ears, are transformed into brain signals, and after various processes that no-one knows much about and no-one has any conscious access to, there arises, by some process that is still an unresolved mystery, a perception of the word that has just been said. The perception is not the thing, the process by which the perception arose is not the perception, I do not mistake my subjective experience of the perception for an account of how that perception was created, and so on. The "intuitive model" that he uses this thought experiment to refute is to me so, so... I just can't even.
I attribute this to reading Korzybski during the golden age of science fiction, i.e. aged fifteen.[1]
But it reminds me of an analogy. There's generally two kinds of people who find massages physically uncomfortable...
I don't find it uncomfortable, once I've concentrated hard enough to get past my ticklishness, but I've never seen the point. I've tried receiving it a couple of times (in one-off contexts like a workshop at a sci-fi convention) but it doesn't do anything for me. Neither do hugs. Where hugs are the custom, ok, I'll go along, but a handshake does me fine.
Having seen him mentioned in stories by Heinlein and Van Vogt, I found "Science and Sanity" in the public library. It also had many volumes of Bourbaki, from which I learned point-set topology, and an old, leatherbound copy of Spengler's "Decline of the West", from which I cannot say I learned anything. How many public libraries have books like that nowadays? ↩︎
"Focussed attention" is far more wide-ranging than what people talk about, when they talk about hypnosis, including the article that you linked, and even the quote you excerpted from it.
Right now my attention is focussed on composing this comment. Is that "hypnosis"? A couple of days ago my attention was focussed for several hours on a long bicycle ride. (Or to put that another way, I did a long bicycle ride.) Is that "hypnosis"? This evening, my attention will be focussed, for a time, on bell-ringing. Are any of these things "hypnosis"?
I say, no, they are not. The only reason to describe hypnosis as just "focussed attention" is to conceal everything else that is going on.
To know how the magician does the trick, watch his other hand.
Have you read Steve Byrnes' post on enlightenment/PNSE?
I probably noticed it and the sequence it belongs to as it went by, but didn't pay it much attention. I just find the whole paradigm there vaguely irritating. For the specific one you linked, in section 6.2.1 I see the same sort of thing I identified in CstineSublimes's question to me, and I see also in the headology of martial arts instructors teaching the "unbendable arm" by first bamboozling the students into doing it wrong and then teaching them the woo version, when you can actually just do the thing and bypass all that. In this case the "Conventional Intuitive Self-Model" is the thing the writer is first persuading us we all have, then he knocks that down and presents the "PNSE intuitive self-model" to fill the hole.
As for PNSE itself, some years earlier I commented on a paper on PNSE by one of its advocates, Jeffery A. Martin. The paper's own description of PNSE made it look like dysfunctional wireheading.
Poisoned chalice, miraculous draught of enlightenment, or ordinary tap water?
And in the idea I presented, consciousness was the achievement. And now, people trying to make sense of the old stories think that the point is to extinguish it. Independently of the truth of my speculation, I cannot see that as a thing worth doing.
Oh yes! That is exactly what it does!
That’s what keeps this a speculation, the testimony of those who say they have achieved such a thing. Until I have such an experience myself, I cannot take any definite view on what they are talking about.
I did give you a link to his profile. One of his recent postings even has “hypnosis” in the title.
As I observe it (but he is the one to speak—or be read—in detail) the act involves such things as a confident manner, establishing a frame for the conversation and breaking any conflicting frame coming from the subject, internally staying always at the meta-level and regarding the subject as a thing to be operated, not an equal in a conversation. There are any number of detailed technical tricks that may be employed, many of them coming from NLP. The purpose is to get the subject to do whatever it is that one wants them to do, that they may not be able or inclined to do just on someone’s say-so.
I have described this in a way that says nothing about using this art for good or for evil. (On the evil side, see the Zizians and Leverage, of which there are detailed accounts on LW.)
They say in computer security, “a trusted system is one that has the ability to break your security.” One trusts that the system will only use its elevated access to do the things you gave it that access for.
Beware who you give root access to your self.
Well now, that's a dark arts question right there. A straw man in one hand and an attempt to lead the witness in the other, like a stage magician leading someone to "choose" the card the magician has already chosen.
No. I select a card that is not in either of your hands.
I am talking about hypnosis as it has been presented in this discussion forum, most recently by @jimmy.
Happy to get in the first one!
I think rousing the hoi polloi would be counterproductive. They’re a force you cannot align. Like the sorceror’s apprentice animating a broomstick to help carry water, once called up, you cannot tell them to stop.