I disagree with your argumentation but agree there’s quite a significant (e.g. 6.5%) chance that you’re correct about the thesis that consciousness has causal efficacy through quantum indeterminacy and that this might be helpful for alignment.
However, my take is that if the effects were very significant and similarly straightforward, they would be scientifically detectable even with very simple fun experiments like the “global consciousness project”. It’s hard to imagine “selection” among possibly infinite universes and planets and billions of years—but if you manage to do so, the “coincidences” that brought about life can be easily explained with the anthropic principle.
I see this as a more general lesson: People are often overconfident about a theory because they can’t imagine an alternative. When it comes to consciousness, the whole debate comes down to to what extent something that seems impossible to imagine is a failure of imagination vs failure of a theory. Personally, I myself give most weight to Rusellian monism but I definitely recommend letting some room for reductionism, especially if you don’t see how anyone could possibly believe that, as that was the case for me, before I deeply engaged with the reductionist literature.
But I’m glad whenever people aren’t afraid to be public about weird ideas—someone should be trying this and I’m really curious whether e.g. Nirvanic AI finds anything.
Two things to this. First, I flunked on footnotes here – left the ones from the original Substack link. Therefore you might have missed an important footnote regarding the scientific falsifiability:
8: There is a caveat though. If we take literally the interpretation that our reality is actually “the universe playing hide-and-seek with itself,” then it might actively prevent us from generating evidence that unequivocally proves the true nature of reality. Under QFC, this could be done simply by the highest “universal” consciousness making all quantum phenomena random if they are observed/recorded in a scientific experiment.
So yeah, if the universe was intended to be “Maya” then there might not be any evidence of “tampering” for us to ever find. But generally, I think the evidence so far goes both ways. The “global consciousness project” is stupid in design so I don’t take that seriously. But there’s a lot of interesting research proving non-local effects regarding consciousness, and while I won’t claim none of it is without error/issues, there definitely are a lot of positive results. I’ll be posting in future articles.
Second thing – how does Rusellian monism solve anything about consciousness? I don’t see any explanatory power there, you’d need to specify a lot more.
I disagree with your argumentation but agree there’s quite a significant (e.g. 6.5%) chance that you’re correct about the thesis that consciousness has causal efficacy through quantum indeterminacy and that this might be helpful for alignment.
However, my take is that if the effects were very significant and similarly straightforward, they would be scientifically detectable even with very simple fun experiments like the “global consciousness project”. It’s hard to imagine “selection” among possibly infinite universes and planets and billions of years—but if you manage to do so, the “coincidences” that brought about life can be easily explained with the anthropic principle.
I see this as a more general lesson: People are often overconfident about a theory because they can’t imagine an alternative. When it comes to consciousness, the whole debate comes down to to what extent something that seems impossible to imagine is a failure of imagination vs failure of a theory. Personally, I myself give most weight to Rusellian monism but I definitely recommend letting some room for reductionism, especially if you don’t see how anyone could possibly believe that, as that was the case for me, before I deeply engaged with the reductionist literature.
But I’m glad whenever people aren’t afraid to be public about weird ideas—someone should be trying this and I’m really curious whether e.g. Nirvanic AI finds anything.
Two things to this. First, I flunked on footnotes here – left the ones from the original Substack link. Therefore you might have missed an important footnote regarding the scientific falsifiability:
So yeah, if the universe was intended to be “Maya” then there might not be any evidence of “tampering” for us to ever find. But generally, I think the evidence so far goes both ways. The “global consciousness project” is stupid in design so I don’t take that seriously. But there’s a lot of interesting research proving non-local effects regarding consciousness, and while I won’t claim none of it is without error/issues, there definitely are a lot of positive results. I’ll be posting in future articles.
Second thing – how does Rusellian monism solve anything about consciousness? I don’t see any explanatory power there, you’d need to specify a lot more.