Why don't we just, like, try and build safe AGI? 2022-01-01T23:24:34.114Z

Comment by Sun on Meditation and Neuroscience, some odds and ends · 2022-02-08T10:47:42.431Z · LW · GW

(Also thousands of hours of meditation). I didn't get any of this. But, somehow, it seems meaningful. I did get some of it. 

Anyway as a long-term meditator myself. There is definitely something 'here', which is also truly profound (and very mundane). For me the profound part of it is that 'experience' becomes intrinsically meaning-laded, adventurous, deep. There is also a sense of 'going somewhere' that wasn't there before. Like, wow, you can change your mind in fundamental ways; that is fun.  And like, the quality of your experience can become truly better and better over time. Before my experience was one of 'make more money, more status, more things, more EA status'. But somehow none of that mattered at all. 

And it doesn't, none of that can ever solve the issues meditation is trying to solve. And yet, also, getting all of those things 'more money, more status, more EA status, more beautiful people in your life', is kinda the point of meditation. Or, it should lead there, or, it should lead to a place where that doesn't matter. 

Meditation is something I would both recommend as one of the most important thing a human being can do. And also something as most people shouldn't do. 

The reason is maybe explained in the writing of this post and my own writing. The rest of society has an entirely different way of 'being' than you do, and it becomes very hard to express yourself. It becomes much harder to fit in and to do 'normal' things.  And you often naturally find yourself on the edges of society because of that (for good, or for ill). And this can be stressful and painful. 

It takes a tremendous amount of 'extra cognition' to deal with this 'awake' mind within society (whatever that is). 

And most people don't have that extra slack. They will already be overwhelmed by the results of meditation; let alone trying to have a job, and all those other things. And then this can naturally lead to actually being way worse off (in terms of like your experience of consciousness, and like material/social things) than when you started meditating. But, also, I do believe that eventually most meditators do find those things again, but in a very different way than before.