Why neurotech is maybe the only thing that matters
ZuConnect Istanbul / StreamETH
ZuConnect Istanbul · October 31, 2023 · posted January 30, 2024
Source: https://streameth.org/65a90bfc7932ebe436ba9375/watch?session=65b8f8d4a5b2d09b88ec171f
Canonical transcript: https://opentheory.net/transcripts/why-neurotech-matters/
Machine-generated transcript · not human-reviewed

[00:00:04.380] There's some pretty fantastic claims from the meditators, I will say. So Shinzen Young has made a couple claims. One is that the sort of counterfactual claim of him having a regular good practice, that he's literally 10x'd his subjective moment-to-moment experience.
[00:00:25.680] It's just literally 10 times better because of his meditation. And that's a lot. It's not just 10% more, it's 10 times better.
[00:00:35.280] So that's something like if there are those kind of gains up for grabs, then is there maybe another 10x? Is there 100x?
[00:00:51.280] Can we... Right now, having a good meditation practice is very hard.
[00:00:55.680] It takes time. It takes effort. It's a lot of sitting on the ground with your eyes closed.
[00:01:00.960] Can we speed it up so it doesn't take 10 years, 30 years, etc.?
[00:01:04.920] So I think this is also very important.
[00:01:10.180] One of the main promises from the 60s, and especially with this psychedelic or pathogen MDMA,
[00:01:21.160] was that it could offer some sort of penicillin for the brain.
[00:01:25.680] And this is a very powerful phrase that the world really changed when penicillin sort of became available.
[00:01:37.800] It used to be that getting a scratch, you could die.
[00:01:41.020] And now that's not the case.
[00:01:44.420] And if there's some kind of analog for sort of mental well-being that's sort of very simple, that could be very, very significant.
[00:01:54.680] So...
[00:01:56.180] Psychedelics haven't quite...
[00:01:58.680] Like, they have some downsides, but neurotech...
[00:02:03.000] Who knows?
[00:02:06.360] So the next item that I would want to mention is that...
[00:02:11.440] Zuzalu won, we can say.
[00:02:13.660] Nate Soares mentioned that he's very interested in what is a mind and how do we align them?
[00:02:20.100] And I just think that you can't really answer this
[00:02:25.680] with what is a brain and how does it work.
[00:02:29.900] And sort of, you know, there's this beautiful dance of multi-level alignment that evolution has sort of prepared for humans.
[00:02:39.680] And yeah, just digging into that.
[00:02:42.780] And I think that that road leads through neurotech.
[00:02:48.220] And finally, a little bit more philosophically.
[00:02:51.640] So my background is originally in philosophy.
[00:02:55.680] So apologies.
[00:02:57.260] But there's this question of what's special about humans.
[00:03:02.040] There's a lot of sort of comments about AI and AI risk and what's at stake and what could be lost.
[00:03:09.420] And I guess the most common phrase is like, we could all die.
[00:03:15.680] And maybe that's true.
[00:03:17.560] But I also think that in an uncareful future,
[00:03:22.480] if we don't sort of know why we're doing this,
[00:03:25.680] why humans are beautiful,
[00:03:27.460] we could lose it.
[00:03:29.540] And that forms of beauty that are legible are more likely to persist under transformations.
[00:03:36.740] And I think we're going to see a lot of transformations in the future.
[00:03:40.260] And again, I think that just having an experimental mode for building things for the brain,
[00:03:46.380] this is the way to get clarity on that.
[00:03:50.940] So two empirical things that I'm particularly looking at.
[00:03:56.120] Understanding, so my latest research is on understanding cognition and emotion
[00:04:00.520] from the interaction between the neural and the vascular system
[00:04:03.360] and how this can help parameterize drugs and different illnesses and so on.
[00:04:11.400] And
[00:04:12.680] And I'm also like, I guess if I had to give one vision today,
[00:04:19.260] one sort of picture for all of you to sort of try to see, like,
[00:04:25.680] oh, wow, that's cool.
[00:04:27.120] Or like, what would it feel like to live in this kind of world?
[00:04:32.340] If we could see the electromagnetic field,
[00:04:36.200] if, for example, you know, in a meditation hall,
[00:04:39.760] if there were 20 people sort of all just meditating very carefully
[00:04:44.580] and they all had EEGs on,
[00:04:47.820] so they could sort of measure brain activity.
[00:04:51.320] And then the meditation teacher
[00:04:55.680] in the meditation hall had an Apple Vision Pro on.
[00:04:59.000] And could
[00:05:00.000] the configuration of each person's EM
[00:05:05.260] When William Field was sort of projected onto his display, he could see what people were doing with their minds.
[00:05:12.860] He could see, oh, like, you're doing something right here, or, oh, I know this pattern.
[00:05:20.200] I know what you're doing wrong.
[00:05:21.780] Maybe you can try something else.
[00:05:23.320] So I find that humans are such visual creatures that we like to see things.
[00:05:30.740] And when we see things, we can understand things.
[00:05:35.140] So I guess I'm very personally excited about, like, real-time visualization, sort of AR visualization of the EM field.
[00:05:46.520] So I guess my sort of wish to hyperstition something into being here would be if someone would write up a white paper spec
[00:06:00.740] on what would be needed to do this and sorting out if it's more of a hardware problem.
[00:06:06.940] I don't think so.
[00:06:08.000] I think off-the-shelf stuff could work.
[00:06:09.480] Or if it's more of a hardware integration problem or a user interface problem.
[00:06:16.400] So that's what I have today.
[00:06:19.000] Thank you.