Why neurotech is maybe the only thing that matters

Transcript

00:00:04There'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.

00:00:25It'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.

00:00:35So that's something like if there are those kind of gains up for grabs, then is there maybe another 10x? Is there 100x?

00:00:51Can we... Right now, having a good meditation practice is very hard.

00:00:55It takes time. It takes effort. It's a lot of sitting on the ground with your eyes closed.

00:01:00Can we speed it up so it doesn't take 10 years, 30 years, etc.?

00:01:04So I think this is also very important.

00:01:10One of the main promises from the 60s, and especially with this psychedelic or pathogen MDMA,

00:01:21was that it could offer some sort of penicillin for the brain.

00:01:25And this is a very powerful phrase that the world really changed when penicillin sort of became available.

00:01:37It used to be that getting a scratch, you could die.

00:01:41And now that's not the case.

00:01:44And 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.

00:01:54So...

00:01:56Psychedelics haven't quite...

00:01:58Like, they have some downsides, but neurotech...

00:02:03Who knows?

00:02:06So the next item that I would want to mention is that...

00:02:11Zuzalu won, we can say.

00:02:13Nate Soares mentioned that he's very interested in what is a mind and how do we align them?

00:02:20And I just think that you can't really answer this

00:02:25with what is a brain and how does it work.

00:02:29And sort of, you know, there's this beautiful dance of multi-level alignment that evolution has sort of prepared for humans.

00:02:39And yeah, just digging into that.

00:02:42And I think that that road leads through neurotech.

00:02:48And finally, a little bit more philosophically.

00:02:51So my background is originally in philosophy.

00:02:55So apologies.

00:02:57But there's this question of what's special about humans.

00:03:02There's a lot of sort of comments about AI and AI risk and what's at stake and what could be lost.

00:03:09And I guess the most common phrase is like, we could all die.

00:03:15And maybe that's true.

00:03:17But I also think that in an uncareful future,

00:03:22if we don't sort of know why we're doing this,

00:03:25why humans are beautiful,

00:03:27we could lose it.

00:03:29And that forms of beauty that are legible are more likely to persist under transformations.

00:03:36And I think we're going to see a lot of transformations in the future.

00:03:40And again, I think that just having an experimental mode for building things for the brain,

00:03:46this is the way to get clarity on that.

00:03:50So two empirical things that I'm particularly looking at.

00:03:56Understanding, so my latest research is on understanding cognition and emotion

00:04:00from the interaction between the neural and the vascular system

00:04:03and how this can help parameterize drugs and different illnesses and so on.

00:04:11And

00:04:12And I'm also like, I guess if I had to give one vision today,

00:04:19one sort of picture for all of you to sort of try to see, like,

00:04:25oh, wow, that's cool.

00:04:27Or like, what would it feel like to live in this kind of world?

00:04:32If we could see the electromagnetic field,

00:04:36if, for example, you know, in a meditation hall,

00:04:39if there were 20 people sort of all just meditating very carefully

00:04:44and they all had EEGs on,

00:04:47so they could sort of measure brain activity.

00:04:51And then the meditation teacher

00:04:55in the meditation hall had an Apple Vision Pro on.

00:04:59And could

00:05:00the configuration of each person's EM

00:05:05When William Field was sort of projected onto his display, he could see what people were doing with their minds.

00:05:12He could see, oh, like, you're doing something right here, or, oh, I know this pattern.

00:05:20I know what you're doing wrong.

00:05:21Maybe you can try something else.

00:05:23So I find that humans are such visual creatures that we like to see things.

00:05:30And when we see things, we can understand things.

00:05:35So I guess I'm very personally excited about, like, real-time visualization, sort of AR visualization of the EM field.

00:05:46So I guess my sort of wish to hyperstition something into being here would be if someone would write up a white paper spec

00:06:00on what would be needed to do this and sorting out if it's more of a hardware problem.

00:06:06I don't think so.

00:06:08I think off-the-shelf stuff could work.

00:06:09Or if it's more of a hardware integration problem or a user interface problem.

00:06:16So that's what I have today.

00:06:19Thank you.