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Starting your introduction with
A few million years ago, something very strange happened.
seems likely to turn away roughly 40% of the US population, along with any leaders who need the goodwill of that 40% to keep their positions.
The point I understand you to be making (tripling the brain size of a chimp gives more than triple the impact) could be easily made without this sentence to introduce it. Given the importance of the US in addressing the existential threat of AI, and assuming one of the goals of this article is to be a general call to action, potentially alienating nearly half the target audience seems counterproductive.
This definitely helps clarify, thank you very much. I suspect it will take me some time to fully understand your ideas, but my current best stab at a (probably overcompressed) summary would be:
Our usual state of mind consists of experiencing a profusion of thoughts and inner sensations. These thoughts interact with each other, and generate further thoughts. We may experience a causal connection between thoughts, leading to the experience of “trains of thought”. This experience of causal connection may or may not accurately reflect the causal process giving rise to the thoughts. Individual thoughts or trains of thought compete for attention. It is this welter of activity that is Noise.
The absence of Noise is experienced as an inner silence, the Void. This differs from what we experience after suppressing Noise: it’s the difference between throwing a blanket over a loud radio, and switching the radio off. Being (as contrasted with doing) ultimately resides in the Void.
Thoughts may arise from the Void. These will be experienced as without cause. For example, choices or desires arising from the Void feel uncaused, resulting in the experience of free will. This contrasts with goals, which are experienced as both caused by thoughts, and causing thoughts: they are an integral part of Noise.
By starting from the Void, we decrease the extent to which our thoughts arise from spurious interactions due to Noise, and instead flow directly from our being. This allows our thoughts and our doing to serve our being. Goals then cease to define or control us, and instead are tools to be dropped once they cease to be useful.
Hopefully I'm not totally misunderstanding you here.
Yes, this feels much clearer now, thank you.
Really enjoyed this article! Your comment here was also helpful, but left me with a couple questions.
The concept of goals gets pretty slippery as you do this because being takes precedence over doing.
How do you see motivation working once you start abandoning the concept of goals?
What if something you "terminally" desire in the world isn't a fit for reality? Would you rather discover that and grieve, or not look and keep trying?
Could you give a specific example of a terminal value failing to fit reality, and what abandoning it/changing it to fit reality would look like?
I'm having difficulty understanding exactly what an answer of "such a probability does not exist" means in this context. Assuming we both were subjected to the same experiment, but I then assigned a 50% probability to being the Original, how would our future behaviour differ? In what concrete scenario (other than answering questions about the probability we were the Original) would you predict us to act differently as a result of this specific difference in belief?