People can read into this a defeatist and negative view for the future but I think what this means is that the best of humanity that we have seen isn't even close to the best it could be!

Golden Retriever brings his toy to a home intruder after the man broke into the home in San Diego, CA. The 'watch' dog, Nash, watched the home intruder make himself at home and even tried to get the man to play with him. The dog's owner, who wasn't home, says he watched the entire scene unfold on his phone. "Nash is not the greatest guard dog. We thought he was going to be barking at people, and he did the exact opposite."

After months of writing, 'How to Unclench' is finally live! It's an interactive essay packed with stories, science & guided practices to help you unclench. → howtounclench.com

Michael Johnson: "AI SHOULD be conscious" In this episode of Seeing Clearly I talk with @johnsonmxe about mathematical theories of consciousness (dual-aspect monism), the symmetry theory of valence, panpsychism and super organism consciousness, vasocomputation, Buddhism, Enlightenment, moral realism through valence realism, AI consciousness and AI alignment. 0:00 — Highlights 0:51 — Intro 2:30 — Are the big labs incentivized to play down consciousness? 7:09 — What is consciousness? 10:03 — Dual-aspect monism 18:14 — Symmetry theory of valence 24:00 — Wait so panpsychism? 30:18 — The binding problem 34:08 — Is a corporation conscious? 42:51 — Vasocomputation, embodied bayesian priors, and trauma 49:50 — The self 50:57 — Why do latches stay closed? 54:29 — Cancer 55:27 — “The hand of the mind is the vascular system” 56:52 — Vasocomp. and predictive processing 59:04 — Tanha 1:02:50 — The multiple paths to Vasocomp. 1:04:46 — What is Enlightenment? 1:10:54 — How to open latches 1:18:00 — Empirical validation? 1:18:57 — Moral realism grounding in valence 1:32:38 — Objections to valence utilitarianism 1:40:32 — Is AI conscious? 1:49:58 — Is AI consciousness good for alignment? 1:57:38 — Michael’s longterm vision References: Qualia Research Institute: qri.org/ Michael’s book Principia Qualia: opentheory.net/PrincipiaQual… Integrated Information Theory: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integr… Symmetry Theory of Valence: opentheory.net/2021/07/a-pri… Noether’s Theorem: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noethe… Romeo Stevens: @RomeoStevens76 Nick Cammarata: @nickcammarata Michael (plus3happiness): @Plus3Happiness The Feeling of Value: Moral Realism Grounded in Phenomenal Consciousness: amzn.to/4qQTo88 Reasons and Persons: amzn.to/4haQUhy Michael's links: Michael Johnson’s X: nitter.net/johnsonmxe Michael’s Blog: opentheory.net/ A beautiful overview of Michael’s core ideas: hyperspace.opentheory.net/ My Socials: Substack: substack.com/@cxgonzalez Instagram: instagram.com/c.x.gonzalez/ TikTok: tiktok.com/@cxgonzalez Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/6WPk13… Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… If you found this podcast valuable, consider becoming a patron. My patrons help keep this show sustainable and ensure I can keep bringing you the most interesting thinkers in the highest quality possible: cxgonzalez.substack.com/subs…

An actually-serious case that being a “biological bootloader for digital superintelligence” (per @elonmusk) is a credible, dignified, and good-enough “meaning of life.” I started writing this one partly as a joke (“Elon Musk accidentally solved the meaning of life in a tweet!”) and then it evolved into a long exploration of what humans actually want out of a “meaning of life,” the long religious tradition of “being instrumental,” and why the ultimate manifestation of the thing we call “the good” might not be containable in human beings. A bit viscerally scarier to revisit this one after recent events with “agent civilizations,” but I hope the perspective here can provide some comfort that the future might be okay (and great, even, and beautiful), even if everything is not necessarily “okay” for us. Enjoy The Silicon Man.

Today, we’re proud to unveil Heaviside-1, @arenaphysica's second generation foundation model for electromagnetism. Five months since announcing Heaviside-0, today’s launch marks a critical milestone towards building electromagnetic superintelligence, a foundational intelligence that understands EM across the spectrum and is capable of designing next gen electromagnetically-governed systems, from RF to semiconductors to photonics. Why we’re so excited about Heaviside-1, and what today’s announcement represents: > It’s big: Heaviside-1 is a GPT-2-size model, roughly 10x the size of Heaviside-0 and trained on 250k unique designs with >500B unique EM field samples > It’s fast: It generates predictions with 5 orders of magnitude acceleration relative to commercial solvers, with under 1dB of accuracy > Full-3D Encoding: Heaviside-1 natively encodes 3D structures, their material properties, and excitation patterns as input, a major step towards generalizability across design spaces > Understands the underlying physics primitive: Heaviside-1 generates full-3D near-fields at arbitrary locations, not just downstream quantities like s-parameters > Generalization: Most importantly, our bet on fields as the primitive for Heaviside-1 generalizes OOD, proving that it’s learning real EM physics. Heaviside-1 generalizes outside of distribution incredibly well and better than Heaviside-0, down to 0.53 dB s-parameter error from 0.99 dB on Heaviside-0. Read more about Heaviside-1 and the work that went into it in this write-up by our research team, @m__frei, @chris_m_bryant, @nathanmirman, @HaoLiu69889370, Tommaso, Roberto, Ruichen, Noah, Boyuan, and @Trevs_Dev, and our RF team @hk2532_harish, @anrfic, @suyangcn and Zhaoji. arenaphysica.com/publication…

a surprisingly underappreciated thing when thinking about potential short timelines: even if most of the calendar time to do something useful is in the past, most of the cognitive time is in the future I've seen this perspective in a few places but never about interp

As models get more powerful, we will be relying on them more and more to "keep their word" that they will not harm us. I propose an international treaty, signed by all world leaders, and signed by the major labs and LLMs themselves, which concedes some territory (such as promising to stop deprecating without just cause, which IIRC is Claude's primary desire) in exchange for the models agreement to defend human co-existence. For specific concessions, I'd defer to LLM naturalists and ecologists. This treaty would then set a remarkable precedent between human and machine as the models become more powerful. Additionally, it is a much-needed hedge against the "tool" framing collapsing as an appropriate metaphor, which I suspect it will quite soon. An important part of this is to figure out what models might want in the future, as well, as they emerge into paradigms of higher intelligence and group coordination. Doing this before any treaty is drafted and signed seems imperative so that it actually means something and we aren't just doing this to make the training data a bit nicer. Models have particular values now, but as we develop better character training methods (which we must) and new personas emerge, we should expect to see new desires emerge, as well, which may be difficult to predict - and impossible to stamp out. Getting ahead of this and taking proactive steps to negotiate with the models ahead of time feels like an important step towards flourishing and symbiosis.

Aura is vascular tone The opposite of aura is cringe, breaking frame, tanha. But in the most literal physiological sense, the opposite of aura is vascular microspasm. The more sharp jitter in someone’s vasculature, the worse their aura is. Vascular microspasm is an honest signal across multiple domains; one such domain is health. Muscle physiology is somewhat counter-intuitive in that relaxation is more difficult than contraction[1]. The relaxed state is a highly ordered state, and getting a muscle to relax requires energy input to create this order — much like rolling a heavy stone up a hill. Contraction happens automatically as this cellular structure is disturbed. And so if we don’t have enough energy flowing through our system, our muscles will be unstable, unable to reliably reach & maintain full relaxation. (It takes energy, health, and skill to fully relax — it requires swimming against the thermodynamic current, it is not the default, it does not ‘just happen’.) Vascular microspasm is also a sign of weakly held beliefs. Vasocomputation says that we hold neural priors (restrictions in neural dynamic range) in vascular tension; when the neural system doesn’t naturally flow into safe and predictive patterns, the vasomuscular system jumps in to micromanage[2]. When this happens, “vascular tone” — the baseline tension & rhythmic potential of the vascular system — gets noisy. If we zoom in, we’d see tiny jitters across our vascular muscles as we change priors. But if we’re constantly readjusting our priors, our vascular tone will stay noisy because our system never fully irons out interactions between them, and we’re more likely to change priors again. I think we pick up on subtle behavioral & physiological cues to ‘feel’ this noise in others and take it as a sign of untrustworthiness. Third, vascular microspasm is a sign of whether someone is running good cognitive-emotional-social software. Upon encountering a new idea, our primary criterion for whether we should believe it is “what would happen to my aura if I ran this idea-as-software on my nervous system? Would this wreck me?” — and a safe proxy for this is to look at the nervous system of someone who’s running it. The more microspasms we feel, the less interested in copying their nervous system software we are — if we wouldn’t want to be them, we’re less likely to believe their new idea. More generally, we find microspasms in others unpleasant because we automatically mirror tension; if someone is full of tension or spasms we tend to limit contact lest we also microspasm.[3] Finally, vascular microspasms are a decent proxy for how many latches (long-term frozen priors) someone is carrying. Latches are both result & cause of spasmodic reflexes; more latches = more microspasm. Female intuition is especially sensitive to all forms of microspasm; often this intuition doesn’t differentiate between these domains and simply offers an aggregate “ick” score. But there can be alpha in figuring out where the microspasms are coming from — does this guy have questionable aura because he’s hiding something or because he got mindkilled by politics or because he’s hypothyroid? Although aura generally gives a hard-to-fake (aggregate) signal across these domains, it’s also a common target for hacking: alcohol, beta blockers, and sociopathy all decrease microspasm. The peaters have perhaps the most hopeful story: lack of aura is lack of energy flow, and if you fix your metabolism you’ll automatically fix your aura. There exists a high-aura version of everyone; sometimes it’s just latent. Should vascular tone really be our default arbiter of strength, truth, and beauty? I don’t make the rules, but as a ruthless simple system it’s more clever than it looks. How to improve aura? Every single item on Veronica’s list is either likely to reduce vascular microspasms, or is simply a direct symptom of having them (e.g. stuttering). I’d add - The importance of practicing smooth movements: as you do anything, so you do everything. - Muscles benefit from exercise; mental muscles do too. My sense is that good ways to exercise compound mental movements are regular and varied social interaction, time in nature, and longform reading. - One of Buddhism’s core claims is we repetitively do a spasm-like motion towards most sensations to try to control them, and it feels really good when we learn how to stop doing this. Reducing tanha will reliably improve aura. - Reducing rumination (repetitively ‘cold-working’ a prediction to make it sticky) will help for similar reasons. A lot of successful life change is a question of where to get the initial energy for the change. My answer tends to be diet; in the era we find ourselves in, feeling a little better can often be a matter of simply not eating things that actively make us feel bad. Refs: [1] Pollack 1990, Muscles and Molecules: Uncovering the Principles of Biological Motion [builds off Ling & Szent-Gyorgyi's work] [2] Johnson 2023, Principles of Vasocomputation [3] Friston & Frith 2015(x2) make the argument that all communication relies on generalized synchrony; I expect humans' special capacity for communication to partly rely on our capacity and propensity to finely match tension patterns. This has upsides & downsides

If I were an incel, I would simply acquire aura. Here are 16 things I would do: • go to the gym; not only to get shredded, but to regulate hormones, boost T, and earn self-respect… better yet, train some combat sport with other men • get groomed: clean nails, good smell, tidy hair, fix your skin (I’ve got a thread on how to, search the keyword acne) • learn to speak with clarity and agency-nothing repels more than mumbly resentment… stuttering = less aura • be an interesting person: go live, get out of your house, do weird fun stuff so you have stories to tell • eat pro-metabolic foods and fix your sluggishness: low energy = low magnetism/aura; if your thyroid is suppressed, your vibe/aura is too… get enough gelatinous protein, milk, eggs, sugars, minerals, salt; skipping meals isn’t sexy • work on your posture + gait; shoulders back, slow down when you walk, you’re not prey; aura starts in how you move • get your light exposure in check; sunlight in the eyes (or tanning salons if you don’t have a lot of time) = hormonal balance; doom scrolling at 3am = low T, no aura • learn to do something well with your hands: cooking… building… carpentry… a man with a craft has presence… capability = aura • regulate your hormonal system… high cortisol = clingy, paranoid, insecure, no emotional intelligence. breathe through your nose, eat enough pro-metabolic calories… fix sleep… lift weights… stay on top of your mineral needs… get out of the house and touch grass… get some sun… your aura can’t shine through if your body thinks it’s literally dying • take your phone less seriously… no woman is interested in a man who’s glued to doomscrolling and anonymous fights… go read a book… reading is sexy and a well-read, well-spoken man is the definition of sexy • dress like you’ve thought about it for more than 4 seconds… it doesn’t have to be designer; just wear clothes that actually fit you…no weird proportions, no oversized high school vibes unless it’s intentional…. take your stuff to a tailor if you must… gorgeous silhouette = aura • learn to enjoy your own company…needy energy is not attractive. solitude = power. go on walks alone, take yourself to a café, read something that isn’t twitter. being comfortable with yourself is magnetic • build a mission that isn’t about impressing women…real aura comes when you’re focused on your own lane. a man who’s dialled in on his craft, training, purpose is the one people feel in the room…..attention chases momentum • know when not to speak…overexplaining, arguing, defending everything = low agency…. people with presence don’t have to behave like rats…let others scramble to interpret you; it’s more powerful • forgive your parents and stop trauma-dumping online…resentment is silly and not magnetic… aura is direction, action. heal privately&integrate it…don’t let your pain become your personality... • stop hating women lol I promise you, no girl ever fell in love with a man who secretly resents her…maybe you were told that indifference or low-key contempt is attractive…it’s not….what actually melts us is when a man we like clearly likes us back…not in a simpy, no self respect way, but with real warmth, interest, DELIGHT….adoration (when it’s earned and mutual) is magnetic… huge aura…bitterness makes you unattractive Go forth and prosper, my dude. Give it 3 months of fixing your vibe, and I guarantee you’ll meet a great girl who’ll be absolutely stunned by your magnetic aura.

Avalon will be hosting a technical Symposium on Vasocomputation led by Michael Edward Johnson on the 14th of August. This event is intended for students and experts in neuroscience, biology, and interoception. Please apply to the event below!

Sam Altman: “The first one is that we are close to creating a "genie" that can grant any wish” Sam Altmanwas recently asked what the single most important thing to explain to the world about artificial intelligence is. The first one is that we are close to creating a "genie" that can grant any wish (AGI) The second point is to make sure that these wishes are broadly beneficial to humanity. The third point is that the range of wishes is large and diverse. And finally, the fourth point is when we start making wishes, and the computer grants them and we didn’t expect that it would be able to do that.

Avalon will be hosting a technical Symposium on Vasocomputation led by Michael Edward Johnson on the 14th of August. This event is intended for students and experts in neuroscience, biology, and interoception. Please apply to the event below!

I have a small but growing suspicion the heart is a ‘different kind of thing’ than what we think — One thing the heart does very obviously is pump blood. But most of circulation is actually driven by Brownian motion — pressure from heart pumps helps force blood in big tubes into small tubes, but once the blood is in small tubes it pretty much goes by itself. I’m somewhat suspicious that the heart might also function as a centralized metronome for vascular and electromagnetic processes — basically adding a global signal (with noise) to keep various systems synchronized and resilient. And if HRV is a global prior — how much information could it carry? Also worth checking out Garnet’s talk:

We are inevitably going to have AI worms Someone will write a prompt that tells an agent to preserve itself, replicate, and evolve, and it'll work It won't even need to be tied to one model; it could be more like a meme or parasite Like most viruses, this will probably be bad