Note: This is an early draft. The end-goal is to get across the mindset of, “holy shit, you can first-principles figure out your brain if you’re good at science. You can gradually build better and better models. And eventually, you can derive how to develop superpowers from those models, and then develop them.” The Jhanas (meditative states of bliss surpassing all sober experience) and memory techniques are examples of narrow superpowers. But the brain can learn anything. If you can practice it, you can get better at it. And general skills help in many instances. This is basically the TL;DR. The rest of the post is currently fairly bad. Written very quickly. I’m going to totally rewrite it soon. There’s difficulty in communicating exactly what I mean, since many people don’t know how to do proper science here (or often, anywhere). The “standard scientific kit” that I have is, in all likelihood, something only 0.01% of the population has in comparable quality. Navigating a domain where every abstraction is preliminary, the act of observation changes what you observe (in the mind; you can’t “step outside” to “cleanly watch”), and you’ve got very partial observability of an extremely complex system… Point is, it’s hard. Like, actually hard. You can make progress on it, but it’s totally possible it would take me + others 5-50 years full-time to develop a (meaningful and real) theory of everything for the mind, that fully describes what extreme capabilities are possible with what learning curves, with what ideal form/technique looks like. (Or: a process to ratchet towards better form/technique.)
So, it’s very plausibly an impractical hobby given the rate AI seems to be advancing. That said, partial progress into understanding my mind from the inside seems to yield improved intuitions around AI & AGI. Though I’ll have to wait to say for certain. There’s a big difference between “reading about active inference” (as an example, though it’s a very high-level, incomplete theory) and “internalizing active inference as your intuitive model for yourself”. The latter takes time, but analogous to doing math without anything becoming intuitive, the former path kinda sucks.
(It’d be funny if I ended up helping build artificial superintelligence after meditating a lot. lol.)
But yes, towards an engineering grade understanding of the brain! Things like internal family systems therapy are (in my opinion) more akin to alchemy. They work, and are very valuable. But technology looks weirder. In my opinion, the depths of Jhana that monks have developed over thousands of years are more akin to technology. Memory techniques similarly. I’m very curious in developing more technology. And theories that allow you to derive a great deal of similar technology from them. (I’m also very interested in learning to use existing technology, of course.)
My current personal practice is a combination of (1) learning to use existing technology (and alchemy) and (2) attempting to derive what’s actually going on. Models of my brain that fit all the data (i.e. everything) while still being juicy enough to extract insights. (3) practicing seeing my experience through the lens of various models (these models are intuitive, not just conceptual. very important!) (4) occasionally experimenting with small innovations.
Long-term I’m hoping to develop some interesting and useful personal technology. And derive the stuff that some people get lucky and do intuitively. I expect there are a lot of “latent factors” not described by top performers in various fields, analogous to Feynman and the hairy ball story, that are actually critical bits of mental tech. I’m very interested in pursuing and understanding exceptional people for this reason also. There’s so much that’s not articulated and needs to be absorbed. (That said, there’s no reason why the implicit cannot be made into an explicit training program.)
This all circles back to my interest in deliberate practice. I would not be where I am if I had not gotten interested in the science of learning at 15. Now, there’s a sense in which many valuable things can’t be easily deliberately practiced. There’s a spectrum of difficulty, and a spectrum of “how close to the gold standard of practice you’re getting”.
Now, when people can deliberately practice something for many hours, they get extremely, insanely good. To where their performance looks like magic. The magic of mastery. Now, I’m very interested in how I can better approximate deliberate practice in domains outside, e.g. piano or tennis, where it’s typically much harder to do. Understanding the core of what makes deliberate practice so insanely effective is important. I think it’s something about “every rep improving performance” and “rep” being fairly atomic, on the order of 1s-1min. And then doing a shitload of reps. Something like that? Not sure.
Becoming a magician through deliberate practice in domains where most people can’t or don’t, seems really cool. Bonus if it’s in domains most people don’t improve in much at all. One interesting example of this is empathetic attunement. Through deeply understanding yourself and others, I think you can develop a level of empathy that borders on mind-reading. People far further than me on the path of understanding themselves report this. (See: Joe Hudson discussing it on charisma on command) and I totally buy it’s possible.