Response to "You Cannot Be Both Smart And Blissful at the Same Time" @/Andr%C3%A9sG%C3%B3mezEmilsson

Andrés Gómez Emilsson | Response to "You Cannot Be Both Smart And Blissful at the Same Time" @/Andr%C3%A9sG%C3%B3mezEmilsson | Uploaded September 2022 | Updated October 2024, 13 hours ago.
O3 - “You cannot be both smart and blissful at the same time.”

(On the Hedonistic Imperative Responses Bingo - hpluspedia.org/wiki/Responses_to_the_Hedonistic_Imperative_Bingo)

Uniform bliss… an IV heroin rush… meditative cessations - Nirodha-samāpatti - NIRVANA! … are NOT conducive to serious mental compute.

But uniform bliss is NOT what we’re talking about.

Rather, information-sensitive gradients of wellbeing! Even if hedonic range is necessary for compute - we could remap a motivational architecture from -10 to +10 [in the valence scale], to a range from +70 to +100! It’ll still work to get us moving and thinking, as shown by many people lucky to have naturally high baselines of hedonic tone.

That said, why not? Why not sprinkle moments of perfect bliss here and there? It’s a powerful motivator! Even Rob Burbea who advocates against becoming a bliss junkie, says that Samadhi is replenishing, rejuvenating, and motivating! Let’s have some of it!

The Hedonistic Imperative (David Pearce) - hedweb.com
Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (Daniel Ingram) - mctb.org

$Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain (2nd round EAGxVirtual 2020 lightning talk application) I briefly explain that while some distributions (e.g. the size of the leaves of a tree) follow a Gaussian bell-shaped pattern, many others (e.g. avalanches, size of asteroids, etc.) follow a long-tail distribution. Long-tail distributions have the general property that a large fraction of the volume is accounted for by a tiny percent of instances (e.g. 80% of the snow that falls from the mountain will be the result of the top 20% largest avalanches). I then explain that based on previous research we have conducted at the Qualia Research Institute we have arrived at the tentative conclusion that the intensity of pleasure and pain follow a long-tail distribution. Why? First, neural activity on patches of neural tissue follow log-normal distributions (an instance of a long-tail distribution). Second, the extremes of pleasure and pain are so intense that they cannot conceivably be just the extremes of a normal distribution. This includes, on the positive end: Jhana meditation, 5-MeO-DMT peak experiences, and temporal lobe epilepsy (Dostoevsky famously saying hed trade 10 years of his life for just a few moments of his good epileptic experiences). On the negative end, things like kidney stones, cluster headaches, fibromyalgia, and migraines top the charts of most intense pain. And third, all of the quantitative analysis we conducted on a survey about peoples best and worst experiences showed that the ratings, comparisons, and rankings of such experiences was far more consistent with a long-tail distribution than a normal distribution. I then explain that this is an *important*, *tractable*, and *neglected* cause. 1) Important because we may be able to reduce the worlds suffering by a significant amount if we just focus on preventing the most intense forms of suffering. 2) Tractable because there are already many possible effective treatments to these disorders (such as LSD microdosing for cluster headaches, and FSM for kidney stones). 3) And neglected because most people have no clue that pain and pleasure go this high. Most utilitarian calculus so far seems to assume a normal distribution for suffering, which is very far from the empirical truth. Bentham would recoil at the lack of an exponent term when additively normalizing pain scales. I conclude by adding that in Effective Altruism there might be an implicit youth bias involved in the lack of knowledge of this phenomenon - due to the age of the people in the movement, most EA activists will not themselves have had intensely painful experiences. Thus, why it is so crucial to raise awareness about this topic in the community (it does not show up on its own). Simply put: because the logarithmic nature of pleasure and pain is *news* to most people in EA. For more, see the original article: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gtGe8WkeFvqucYLAF/logarithmic-scales-of-pleasure-and-pain-rating-ranking-and And the presentation (given at EA New York): https://youtu.be/IeD3nZX1Sr4$

Digital Sentience: Can Digital Computers Ever Wake Up?

Open Individualism (Part 1): Introduction

Why Does Anything Exist? Zero Ontology, Physical Information, and Pure Awareness

The Qualia Review - Episode 2: Mens Perfumes

Open Individualism (Part 5): Ethics, Coordination, Game Theory

The Future of Consciousness (QRI summer party)

Candy Flipping Optimized: Why LSD + MDMA Points to Blissful Nondual Awareness and How to Maximize It

Why Meditate on the Three Characteristics: A Recipe for Holistic Valence via Meta-Systemic Annealing