Michael Edward Johnson
@johnsonmxe
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Author of Principia Qualia, Symmetry Theory of Valence, Neural Annealing, Principles of Vasocomputation. Friend to the future.
~dacpet-sardef
Joined August 2010
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Crab tanha
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Everybody knows GPT5 is going to blow the top off. But I think most people have a bad model of why, and what’s happening behind the scenes (1/n)
openai is the most talented and nicest group of people i have ever seen in one place
working on the hardest, most interesting, and most important problems
with all the key resources in place
extremely focused on making AGI
you should perhaps considering joining us
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In the beginning there was sensation
Humans developed the ability to freeze sensations, then used these frozen pieces to construct a grammar for thought (vasocomputation)
This led to words, magical spells that can conjure sensations in both caster and target
This led to foom
Ok, question: Enlightenment seems to be about "seeing through the dream" i.e. not anymore reifying your own imaginations as real (as sense perceptions). But why are you reifying your own imaginations as real in the first place? Is this just the condition of entry into language?
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Great thread. My sense is the basic (smooth muscle) logic of the gut was copied and repurposed to “digest” thoughts. These systems are still linked & if you update your mental priors via meditation, these recalibrated priors will propagate back to the gut
thing i'm often confused by: like 80% of my long term meditator friends report becoming sensitive to tons of foods
does meditation cause weird food issues or is our food just kind of poisonous to everyone and meditation makes them sensitive enough to feel it
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Nattokinase saved my life a few years ago. You should probably consider taking it.
🧵
NK is a cheap, powerful, and easy to get fibrinolytic that dissolves blood clots and plaques. Imo it’s also the supplement with the best +EV for longevity and cognitive health. (1/n)
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Yesterday I posted Principles of Vasocomputation, a piece of deep research describing the vasomuscular system as a crucial regulatory mechanism for neural activity, and the product of about a year’s worth of thinking. 🧵
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Legend has it that a famous philosopher literally invented silent reading. I.e. everybody was reading out loud; he figured out you could do it without making sound.
Comments:
(1) somatic patterns can be viral
(2) what similar decoupling hasn't been invented yet but could be?
Silly but realising now: in a time when most people could not read most people would LISTEN someone read. Usually religious texts. So less like our individual solitary reading and more like a group guided meditation. "Reading" was probably this for most of people most of history
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If a dolphin wants to explain there’s a school of fish nearby, it will send the sound of a sonar return from a phantom school of fish — literally the *sensation* of fish. I suspect this is a good model for early human language — “magic spells that involuntarily invoke sensations”
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As far as I can tell, the LLM game is about data quality much moreso than anything else. We see that over and over in papers: all LLM architectures converge on the same answer (approximation of the data). But garbage in, garbage out — the data itself is centrally important
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@liminal_warmth
I’ve been thinking of ADHD as the body’s tensile system being inadequate for holding the brain’s neural system in a particular context-appropriate shape. Basically, if you’re experiencing ADHD, your body is holding fragments of multiple disparate contexts and is unable to commit…
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I expect that sometime around 2017, OpenAI launched a secret project to collect as much high-quality text as possible. Their position today reflects the success of this project — much moreso than how many GPUs they have
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Competitors can’t easily run the same play, because (1) companies are more closely guarding their data against scraping, and (2) many sources of data today are contaminated with AI-generated text. Today, most AIs are trained off of GPT4 outputs
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It would be very difficult to offer a formal theory of consciousness where megastructures like stars aren’t conscious. We speak about space as lifeless & empty — but it’s entirely plausible that we are not even our own solar system’s primary charismatic qualiafauna
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@metaLulie
@moissanist
Essentially, the muscular system (in particular smooth muscles & fascia, and in particular VSMCs) holds tension as a way to restrict the patterns of the neural system. Sort of like how pinching a vibrating system reduces the ways it can vibrate. These pinches can be brief, or can…
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We don’t always see the “evolving meta” in AI development, just the results. My guess is the low-end meta is “get data parity with 2020-era OpenAI”. But at the high end, I suspect it’s shifted to “use AI to directly curate, distill, and synthesize a diamond-perfect dataset”
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New essay about the framerate of consciousness: if life is a sequence of moments, how big are the moments?
Neuroscience has approached the frame-rate of minds via differentiability — if a picture is flashed for 50ms does it affect cognitive processing? What about 10ms?
(1/6)
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What kind of thing is a human nervous system? Some notes from a conversation this fall
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I think wild animal joy is extreme and underappreciated —
And just as there’s a wide range of hedonic set-points between humans, there will be an extreme range of hedonic set-points between species
Who are the winners? I think birds
Who are the losers? Maybe insects
All reasonable observation indicates that most animals feel fantastic in their bodies most of the time. The view that their condition is miserable is a project of very human anxieties about unpredictable environments and the fear driven anticipation of pain.
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@RichDecibels
Love it.
This is going to sound a bit odd, but my pet hypothesis is that a lot of the feeling of loneliness comes from a breakdown of communication within the body.
I’ll reframe “man is a social animal” as “humans are social harmonic computers, designed to toss resonances back…
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Modern LLMs are an effective method for transmuting high-quality data into synthetic intelligence — to extract the motifs of cognition and assemble them in new (although not arbitrarily novel!) ways. A very big result
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Wittgenstein has always been my favorite philosopher but it took me a long time to understand his work as a unified moral project — BOTH his early and later works are about preventing predation of normies by wordcels
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@sama
Such compatibility is ultimately is about mathematical projections and symmetry — each semantic basin is a language-game which respects certain mathematical structures. Distill the structures and play the language-game at a higher level
@nosilverv
@Tysenberg
There was a lot of hunting for the most general form of math/physics/music, and a realization that you can basically build all patterns out of which symmetries are present vs broken. Physicists talk symmetry up in a way that seems almost insane, until you check the reasoning
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My favorite SF author Vernor Vinge passed away this week;
Occasionally, I think great minds go into fiction rather than academia because there they can advance knowledge without being bothered by grants, academic politics, peer review, etc
I think Vinge fit this mold (1/n)
RIP Vernor Vinge. To this day, very few people understand most of what he wrote.
For instance, the "Singularity" was named after the model breakdown in physics when our theory of physics tries to model the center of a black hole, not after a physical infinity.
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The more predictive models you have online, the harder it is to increase your energy parameter
The visual system is a core predictive pipeline; closing your eyes takes it offline & prevents it from doing compression sweeps. Energy & ambivalence build
Same pattern in meditation
"Eyes wide shut: Why closing your eyes 'intensifies' psychedelic trips" - Saga Briggs
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Now the challenge is how to take LLM intelligence and apply it back to data. This is a matter of 1) understanding precisely what makes for the highest-quality training data, and 2) applying synthetic intelligence to turn high-quality human tokens into higher-quality synthetic tks
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@PashaKamyshev
My best guesses at describing what’s going on:
1. Neural component: Hearts have ~44k neurons, which isn’t a lot compared to the brain (~86b) or stomach (~500m) but a heart transplant literally is a (small) brain transplant
2. Muscle reflex component: “What is a memory?” is…
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The pinnacle defended-by-default is what we call the “normie”. An impressive set of solutions for hardening nervous systems against adversarial sensation magic — e.g. mental partitions, type safety on words, selective de-referencing. A tough nut to crack
nerd with lame attitude: Studies show im right
Me: ive never read a book so my entire worldview is based on gnosis
nerd: (his glasses fall off)
Me: Catch you later
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A lot of weird quirks about language and about humans are due to the fact that (1) language opens you up to lots of different mind-control attacks, but (2) you can’t opt-out of language. It’s just too important for connection and function
-> A rich ecosystem of move-countermove
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Likewise, if you can apply current LLMs to identify the worst 10% of your training data and either discard or improve that, the next generation gets a lot better. And you can iterate this
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The dynamic I think tpot clued in on is that the modal egregore is actually pretty hostile to human flourishing and benefits when the mind-body connection is broken
@BishPlsOk
@nosilverv
@Tysenberg
I think much of modernity is aimed at breaking the mind-body connection
The brain is a big hallucinating LLM, the body is ASICs that keep it on track
If the brain is alienated from its ASICs, it can be slurped up into some superorganism, which then provides the grounding
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The strong version of this thesis is that multicellular life started as a big stomach; organs we’ve added since simply take this core logic of digestion, remix it, and apply it to novel sorts of objects. The brain treats information as the gut treats food (ht E.P.H. & R.S.)
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“Fear not the schizo who has 10,000 ideas, fear the schizo-autist who has one idea and tries to explain 10,000 things”
Bruce Lee metaphysics are the soul of scientific progress (and social dystopias)
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One reading of Jaynes’ “Bicameral Mind” is that within ancient history, the causal locus for behavior moved from outside phenomenology to inside
Interesting to consider Neuralink and other BCIs as a reversion to an ancient style
(Great post by Matthew)
Musk frames the problem of extending human cognition into the digital realm as primarily a data rate problem.
This frame, while understandable, is partial at best, and at worst constitutes a fundamental threat to individual agency.
It is at best partial because it ignores the…
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Sensation magic led to great cooperation, and also adversarial sensation magic which fooled and controlled. Dark magicians (wordcels) arose and culled the literal and the boundaryless
If you’ve seen The Invention of Lying (2009) it was probably like that except somewhat darker
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If I was
@sama
I’d be thinking about novel ways to project and distill data — the more angles you can apply the easier it is to find and fix imperfections. Increasingly important in MoE systems which draw from diverse semantic basins — you want experts to be deeply compatible
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An example of this is getting an LLM to transform prose on a topic into a structured textbook, and then training a future AI on this synthetic textbook (either in addition to or instead of the prose)
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Plot for a SF novel: humanity rushes for the singularity, but physical constants start to change. Ultimately we find out we do live in a simulation and when we redline its compute, it enforces a local complexity cap by adjusting physical law away from anthropic optimal
The reason why your memories of the distant past are so fuzzy is the same reason the buildings in the distance in a video game are low polygon count and shrouded in fog — the simulators need to conserve resources to render the nearby stuff.
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It seems likely humanity will build AGI before we properly understand ourselves
I wonder if this is a typical path for intelligent species — maybe organisms with coherent, self-legible cognition get filtered out by wireheading, leaving only the weirdos to build sand gods
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@michael_nielsen
Not a particle physicist but the particle would immediately decay into subparticles and form a gravitationally-significant X-ray cone vaporizing & imparting incredible heat&momentum, which would lead to a huge shock wave and explosion. Basically Earth would shatter->blow up->melt
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But the normie’s defenses make him less agile at addressing novel attacks — and the wordcel never sleeps. Because normies don’t feel the full force of words, they’re especially vulnerable to side-loading
Took me long enough but there's only two things I've always been trying to say. (2) is a subset of (1), really, but I don't yet know how to say precisely how.
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@QiaochuYuan
My model of the body has behavior driven by two systems, neural and vasomuscular;
By default the neural system is lazy, pleasant, a little schizo, “likes to vibe”. Almost all of the heavy-duty processing happens here.
By default the vasomuscular system is anxious, planning,…
@liminal_warmth
I’ve been thinking of ADHD as the body’s tensile system being inadequate for holding the brain’s neural system in a particular context-appropriate shape. Basically, if you’re experiencing ADHD, your body is holding fragments of multiple disparate contexts and is unable to commit…
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Much of life can be rephrased as a question of where to rest your attention
Different organs give different results; the heart is generally much more pleasant to rest your attention in than brain
But it takes a lot of illegible work to even sense this as an option on the menu
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Over time, there’s selection pressure on individual words to naturally de-reference and refer to the pointer, not the sensation. This leads to novel capacities, novel superorganisms that these capacities allow, and novel forms of predation from these superorganisms
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To hold tension is to hold a Bayesian prior as to what areas of your full dynamic range are unsafe in your present circumstance. Tension is our mimetic immune system, our way to collapse wrong/dangerous answers until we’re left with appropriate thought, emotion, and action.…
“When someone says, "I love you" and means it, it opens up her throat- it literally does it. And when the throat opens up, so does the cervix.
I've been checking a woman's dilation at the same time she'd say that, and I could feel a distinct difference in her tissue, in how…
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This implies that there’s a near-duality between problems of digestion and problems of sensory metabolism. E.g. we should expect there to be a sensory analogue to constipation involving the same dynamics+neurotransmitters; rhythmic undulations move things along; etc
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@amasad
My loose expectation is that hybridization with archaic populations (particularly Neanderthals) led to significantly more brain network density (more neurons+synapses per volume) and significantly less canalization. Made us clumsy but better able to learn
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I really love people who take ideas seriously. I also think eigen’s approach is hilarious
various related points
1. most far mode ideas are false and harmful
2. most novel ideas are harmful
3. you are probably operating close to a local optimum in beliefs
just stop believing people
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A bombshell of an open letter dropped this week, with 124 authors (some very notable) criticizing a leading theory of consciousness, IIT, as “pseudoscience”.
I disagree with the theme and arguments of the letter. Erik P. Hoel has a rejoinder (below), which is an an absolute tour…
Yesterday a letter from 100 scientists declared the popular theory of consciousness - Integrated Information Theory - is "pseudoscience."
And that media about it is "scientific misinformation."
The letter is bad. Here's my reply why:
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@slatestarcodex
recently wrote about certain drugs (ketamine, general anaesthetics) having strange/unexpected antidepressant effects. A few thoughts on why I think vasocomputation predicts this, and some concrete predictions:
——
My very simple theory is that general anesthesia…
@QiaochuYuan
General anesthesia is toxic for the brain, but strangely it also seems to cause a long-term boost to mood. I think this is because it releases smooth muscle tension. Some of this tension regenerates over time, but some doesn’t.
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I suspect caffeine (1) increases neural activity, allowing a higher dimensional working space, (2) dials up the vasomotion reflex, leading to more compression pressure on neural patterns. Very potent combination that increases your capacity to chew through complex uncertainty,…
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New Opentheory essay, "Presence neurotechnology & technology-aided direct transmission"
Some thoughts on two useful goals for neurotech
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@sama
How far can you get by using AI to improve its training data, and using the improved data to train a new AI? I see some limitations, but I expect very far indeed
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Wolf is one of the most original thinkers I know and this is a great shakeup of the AI accel/alignment frames.
TL;DR: we expect to be replaced by AI partly because modern life systematically drains our agency. Reclaiming humanity from this own-goal is a condition for good things
This is a pretty good summary of my AI thought: AGI is deadly and can't be aligned but won't meaninglessly eat the light-cone either. True values are perennial and supra-human, and you need to focus on living up to them. Make Yourself Human Again, because you aren't by default.
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One of the most important projects today is making the outside-view case that humans are good, noble, strong, rare: that we are worthy stewards of the universe & worth preserving.
I think this is true. But if we can’t make this case to future AIs, why should they keep us around?
I've increasingly come to the conclusion that "whether humanity goes extinct" is the wrong question to ask.
The paperclip maximizer outcomes are now quite unlikely in my opinion. It is far more likely that we get something that's hard to classify, with few or no biological…
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@BishPlsOk
@nosilverv
@Tysenberg
I think much of modernity is aimed at breaking the mind-body connection
The brain is a big hallucinating LLM, the body is ASICs that keep it on track
If the brain is alienated from its ASICs, it can be slurped up into some superorganism, which then provides the grounding
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Machine consciousness should be among the most important technical problems of our time, but “consciousness discourse” is subtly anchored in ingroup/outgroup distinctions. If something is ingroup it can probably feel; if it’s outgroup it can’t.
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“As you do anything, so you do everything” — switching your mind’s digestion algorithm may have echo effects in your gut. But the smooth muscle motifs for allowing things to self-metabolize won’t always work in the gut! It’ll sometimes produce type errors & the body gets upset
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Objects in the gut are processed through muscular effort; same with the mind*. But the vipassana frame is that many “objects” in the mind are also unnecessary synthetic constructions that can untangle and self-metabolize when we relax
*
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My biggest philosophical claim is that all value functions depend on and eventually converge on symmetry. I think the Symmetry Theory of Valence is unmatched and irreplaceable for dissolving philosophical confusion.
Yudkowsky, Schmidhuber, and Verdon are viewing the same object from different angles. If you accept that utility maximization is compression and thermodynamic energy is compression then they're all part of one underlying pattern: active inference premised on a value model.
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@nosilverv
@Tysenberg
There was a lot of hunting for the most general form of math/physics/music, and a realization that you can basically build all patterns out of which symmetries are present vs broken. Physicists talk symmetry up in a way that seems almost insane, until you check the reasoning
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@nickcammarata
Some surreal experiences for animals:
- Exposure to various psychoactive substances and technological superstimuli;
- Experience of city living and modernity (which has a lot of weird chunky sensory dimensionalities — I wonder if some animals get “Tetris effect” flashes in…
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@nosilverv
It’s also interesting to consider reification as a sensory superstimulus — much like “a single doritos nacho chip contained more flavor than a 17th century feudal peasant would have experienced in an entire lifetime,” a frozen distillation can be more compelling than the reality
maybe non-awakening is what caused human foom?
a gravity well of tension that constantly points you towards your thoughts while simultaneously tricking you into thinking you’re in your head seems really useful for humans, less so for animals, if they have fewer thoughts
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Lots and lots of implications / tacit predictions here; one simple prediction is that meditative attainments will correspond with digestive changes, and potentially vice-versa
Hope to write this up in more depth someday, time and resources permitting
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I think being familiar with what it feels like to have clots — and that nattokinase is a viable treatment for them — is among the most unusual pieces of health knowledge I have. I’d like more people to have this knowledge.
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@redqualia
@markooooooo
The brain applies a very simple and very “greedy” compression algorithm to sensations; this algorithm is a big part of why the brain is so efficient but the results are often also a little insane. The source of both the brain’s efficiency and insanity can be described as “lack of…
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A conversation between some of the leading lights of physics about beauty and symmetry. One thing it can be difficult to express is just how seriously physicists take symmetry — in physics symmetry is not a quirky geometric property, but the core organizing logic of reality (1/3)
Debate about beauty in physics with Max Tegmark
@tegmark
, Michio
@michiokaku
and Juan Maldacena who knows better than to waste his time on twitter. Oh and myself, but I didn't say much so don't worry
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Japanese natto (fermented beans) contains a bacterial enzyme “nattokinase” that’s a natural, broad-spectrum fibrinolytic (clot dissolver). One serving of natto contains about 80mg (~1600 FU) nattokinase. I recommend taking it in pill form —
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Slightly more esoterically, nattokinase also dissolves the covid spike protein(!):
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Looking into a mirror until you like what you see is an incredibly potent spiritual practice
One wonders how large of an impact the invention of mirrors had on human psychology
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Btw I think food sensitivities aren’t a foregone conclusion of meditation, just another type error to resolve; I think
@meditationstuff
has addressed a lot of his food sensitivities
(And as people say a lot of “problems” may just be higher sensory clarity)
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I think of hedonic adaptation as "your body is calibrated to have a certain amount of tension in it"
Awful accident -> you slowly let go of bodily tension until you're back in your range
Win lottery -> your Active Inference scope broadens until you're carrying as much as before
seems straightforward that people seem to be able to hedonically adapt to any good or bad thing that happens to them. so why is it important to give people more resources and freedom? it’s more interesting that way
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The body produces clots (fibrin tangles) to prevent blood loss and mop up small debris like pathogens. Blood loss was a big danger throughout most of our evolutionary past so this system tends to be at high readiness, with clots constantly forming and dissolving. Your background…
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Nattokinase is amazing at dissolving clots. It’s unusual in that it does so via multiple pathways, also reduces blood pressure, & is broadly protective of the cardiovascular system. It also has a fantastic safety profile: people have been eating it for literally thousands of…
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Very interesting. I wouldn’t be surprised if a core difference between scarring & non-scarring healing is whether the local EM patterns are reconstituted along with the tissue. Basically: it’s easier to physically patch a wound than reconstitute the tissue’s original EM mesh …
There's real precedent to "toughing out the pain" and not take opioids when injured.
Opioids "direct tissue repair towards scar healing, with a loss of tissue function, instead of the regenerative process that allows for recovery of both the morphology and function of tissue."
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@xlr8harder
Imo physics belongs to hypercomputation (which simply means a higher order of computer than a TM)
Aaronson has some wicked cool thought experiments around problems we run into if we assume consciousness is Turing-computable
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Had a great time doing a podcast with
@dkazand
— lots of great questions & conversation. We talked about the Symmetry Theory of Valence, vasocomputation, nervous system virtue, and what tension is trying to do for us.
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Nattokinase is sufficiently broad spectrum in what it dissolves that it also dissolves arterial plaques (36% reduction after 6 months of 6000 FU/day, vs 11% with statins):
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With respect to all parties involved, I was not consulted about either of the two claims about my work here and I do not endorse this messaging.
Neural Field Annealing is up as a presentation :-)
Key insight: if you *treat* your nervous system as a field, it will learn to *behave* like a field.
To treat your nervous system as a field, you need to (1) entrain a specific wave equation, and (2) induce smooth geometry.…
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@nosilverv
To circle back to the beginning — here’s the system I believe we use to freeze sensations:
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Aligning strong AI without understanding the structure of consciousness feels similar to going to the moon without Maxwell’s Equations — totally possible in theory, but needlessly difficult
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I was at QRI when I wrote Neural Annealing (2019). It was a solo effort and unpaid work, building off my 2018 Neuroscience of Meditation article and 2019 conference talk. I had some of my best moments at QRI. I stepped down from the board and left last year.
Neural Annealing, more than a metaphor
We take great pride in having created the guiding metaphor for the REBUS and CANAL models of psychedelic therapy and psychopathology.
While we appreciate the widespread adoption and recognition of Neural Annealing, it's crucial to…
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Computationalism can be framed as the thesis that all Turing-complete systems are also “qualia-complete” — that any Turing machine can generate any qualia.
If we can decisively prove this true or false, we can infer much about the future, and avert much conflict.
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The poor suffer
The middle class go to therapy
The well-off go on retreats
The superrich commission autobiographies
Everyone deserves a well written biography.
I was shocked when I discovered some people don't think their life is interesting enough to merit being written down.
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plutonium qualia has got to be wild
At what point do you as a scientist start asking “is this stuff ontologically evil”
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@danielmingram
Here’s the essay. Some Easter eggs for people familiar with my work, in particular the Symmetry Theory of Valence
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@danielmingram
This turned into my latest essay, “Minds as Hyperspheres” — essentially arguing that if we assume minds have equal extension across spatial and temporal dimensions, anything we know about how big they are in space translates to constraints on how long they are in time
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@Tysenberg
@nosilverv
Brief partial origin story:
When I was 20 I had the very strong intuition that “music is to emotion as language is to thought.” I wanted to understand depression and valence and thought music theory was the key to cracking some code.
Postmodernism and most of neuroscience and…
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@profoundlyyyy
@ESYudkowsky
Lawrence Summers, one of the new board members, is functionally an avatar of the government
Or at least one core faction of the government
A similar convergence happened to Google
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A few years ago I had some mysterious symptoms — strange yellowing bruises (especially after flying) despite not bumping into anything, a strange “hot ripping pain” just above my knees, sharp pinprick pains that traveled periodically, strange sluggishness, and eventually…
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But for the average person I think nattokinase is hugely positive. It’s probably especially good to supplement if you have symptoms of clots, are a frequent traveler, have a history of cardiovascular disease / poor diet / arterial plaque, have COVID, are recovering from covid, or…
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Aspirin thins blood by disabling the platelets which form blood clots; warfarin (originally sold as rat poison) blocks vitamin K which blocks coagulation. Nattokinase dissolves clots and other tangles *after* they’re formed, as well as having aspirin-like anticoagulation effects.…
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@mechanical_monk
An unexplored frontier in megastructure engineering is structures specially designed to produce a lot of certain kinds of qualia. LQOs (Large Qualia Objects)
Too early/schizo to say much about these, but imo they should eventually be part of SETI heuristics…
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I’ll be speaking tomorrow at Zuzalu (Montenegro) about my research, 12:30pm at the lighthouse. Looking forward to seeing people!
💡 The Limits of the Utility Function and the Structure of a New Science of Consciousness, by
@johnsonmxe
vote & survey:
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— it’s more convenient and natto’s taste is not for the faint of heart. NK is still a bit rare in physical supplement shops but easy to find online — I usually get mine on Amazon and take 100mg/day or as-needed.
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There’s some question of whether Nattokinase could also help treat Alzheimer’s, prion diseases, and other buildup-related neurodegenerative diseases. Apparently covid seems to create fibrin tangles that contribute to these conditions — dissolving these tangles might be broadly…
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@ESYudkowsky
I think it’s evident that brains and computers are equally real, but I do not believe that electrons and (Turing-level) bits are equally real. We generally speak of what happens within computers in terms of (Turing-level) bits; it’s thus reasonable to ontologically discount this
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