Why neurotech is maybe the only thing that matters
ZuConnect Istanbul / StreamETH
Transcript
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.
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.
So that's something like if there are those kind of gains up for grabs, then is there maybe another 10x? Is there 100x?
Can we... Right now, having a good meditation practice is very hard.
It takes time. It takes effort. It's a lot of sitting on the ground with your eyes closed.
Can we speed it up so it doesn't take 10 years, 30 years, etc.?
So I think this is also very important.
One of the main promises from the 60s, and especially with this psychedelic or pathogen MDMA,
was that it could offer some sort of penicillin for the brain.
And this is a very powerful phrase that the world really changed when penicillin sort of became available.
It used to be that getting a scratch, you could die.
And now that's not the case.
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.
So...
Psychedelics haven't quite...
Like, they have some downsides, but neurotech...
Who knows?
So the next item that I would want to mention is that...
Zuzalu won, we can say.
Nate Soares mentioned that he's very interested in what is a mind and how do we align them?
And I just think that you can't really answer this
with what is a brain and how does it work.
And sort of, you know, there's this beautiful dance of multi-level alignment that evolution has sort of prepared for humans.
And yeah, just digging into that.
And I think that that road leads through neurotech.
And finally, a little bit more philosophically.
So my background is originally in philosophy.
So apologies.
But there's this question of what's special about humans.
There's a lot of sort of comments about AI and AI risk and what's at stake and what could be lost.
And I guess the most common phrase is like, we could all die.
And maybe that's true.
But I also think that in an uncareful future,
if we don't sort of know why we're doing this,
why humans are beautiful,
we could lose it.
And that forms of beauty that are legible are more likely to persist under transformations.
And I think we're going to see a lot of transformations in the future.
And again, I think that just having an experimental mode for building things for the brain,
this is the way to get clarity on that.
So two empirical things that I'm particularly looking at.
Understanding, so my latest research is on understanding cognition and emotion
from the interaction between the neural and the vascular system
and how this can help parameterize drugs and different illnesses and so on.
And
And I'm also like, I guess if I had to give one vision today,
one sort of picture for all of you to sort of try to see, like,
oh, wow, that's cool.
Or like, what would it feel like to live in this kind of world?
If we could see the electromagnetic field,
if, for example, you know, in a meditation hall,
if there were 20 people sort of all just meditating very carefully
and they all had EEGs on,
so they could sort of measure brain activity.
And then the meditation teacher
in the meditation hall had an Apple Vision Pro on.
And could
the configuration of each person's EM
When William Field was sort of projected onto his display, he could see what people were doing with their minds.
He could see, oh, like, you're doing something right here, or, oh, I know this pattern.
I know what you're doing wrong.
Maybe you can try something else.
So I find that humans are such visual creatures that we like to see things.
And when we see things, we can understand things.
So I guess I'm very personally excited about, like, real-time visualization, sort of AR visualization of the EM field.
So I guess my sort of wish to hyperstition something into being here would be if someone would write up a white paper spec
on what would be needed to do this and sorting out if it's more of a hardware problem.
I don't think so.
I think off-the-shelf stuff could work.
Or if it's more of a hardware integration problem or a user interface problem.
So that's what I have today.
Thank you.