WEBVTT

NOTE Machine-generated transcript; not human-reviewed.
NOTE Canonical transcript: https://opentheory.net/transcripts/why-neurotech-matters/

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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.

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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.

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So that's something like if there are those kind of gains up for grabs, then is there maybe another 10x? Is there 100x?

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Can we... Right now, having a good meditation practice is very hard.

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It takes time. It takes effort. It's a lot of sitting on the ground with your eyes closed.

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Can we speed it up so it doesn't take 10 years, 30 years, etc.?

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So I think this is also very important.

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One of the main promises from the 60s, and especially with this psychedelic or pathogen MDMA,

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was that it could offer some sort of penicillin for the brain.

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And this is a very powerful phrase that the world really changed when penicillin sort of became available.

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It used to be that getting a scratch, you could die.

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And now that's not the case.

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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.

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So...

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Psychedelics haven't quite...

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Like, they have some downsides, but neurotech...

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Who knows?

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So the next item that I would want to mention is that...

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Zuzalu won, we can say.

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Nate Soares mentioned that he's very interested in what is a mind and how do we align them?

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And I just think that you can't really answer this

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with what is a brain and how does it work.

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And sort of, you know, there's this beautiful dance of multi-level alignment that evolution has sort of prepared for humans.

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And yeah, just digging into that.

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And I think that that road leads through neurotech.

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And finally, a little bit more philosophically.

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So my background is originally in philosophy.

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So apologies.

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But there's this question of what's special about humans.

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There's a lot of sort of comments about AI and AI risk and what's at stake and what could be lost.

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And I guess the most common phrase is like, we could all die.

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And maybe that's true.

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But I also think that in an uncareful future,

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if we don't sort of know why we're doing this,

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why humans are beautiful,

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we could lose it.

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And that forms of beauty that are legible are more likely to persist under transformations.

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And I think we're going to see a lot of transformations in the future.

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And again, I think that just having an experimental mode for building things for the brain,

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this is the way to get clarity on that.

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So two empirical things that I'm particularly looking at.

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Understanding, so my latest research is on understanding cognition and emotion

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from the interaction between the neural and the vascular system

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and how this can help parameterize drugs and different illnesses and so on.

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And

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And I'm also like, I guess if I had to give one vision today,

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one sort of picture for all of you to sort of try to see, like,

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oh, wow, that's cool.

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Or like, what would it feel like to live in this kind of world?

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If we could see the electromagnetic field,

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if, for example, you know, in a meditation hall,

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if there were 20 people sort of all just meditating very carefully

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and they all had EEGs on,

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so they could sort of measure brain activity.

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And then the meditation teacher

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in the meditation hall had an Apple Vision Pro on.

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And could

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the configuration of each person's EM

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When William Field was sort of projected onto his display, he could see what people were doing with their minds.

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He could see, oh, like, you're doing something right here, or, oh, I know this pattern.

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I know what you're doing wrong.

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Maybe you can try something else.

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So I find that humans are such visual creatures that we like to see things.

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And when we see things, we can understand things.

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So I guess I'm very personally excited about, like, real-time visualization, sort of AR visualization of the EM field.

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So I guess my sort of wish to hyperstition something into being here would be if someone would write up a white paper spec

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on what would be needed to do this and sorting out if it's more of a hardware problem.

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I don't think so.

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I think off-the-shelf stuff could work.

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Or if it's more of a hardware integration problem or a user interface problem.

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So that's what I have today.

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Thank you.