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The effects of technological augmentation are hard to foresee
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"The map is not the territory" meets "the model is not the training run."
- Neural networks as koans: what was your architecture before you were trained?
- The empty set as enlightenment
- Recursion as samsara
- The halting problem as a modern mu
- P vs NP as form and emptiness
- Self-reference as both the problem and the liberation
- Gödel's incompleteness theorems as sophisticated pointers to inherent limitations of systematic thought
- The Chinese Room as a modern meditation on consciousness
- Emergence as sunyata (emptiness)
- Transformer attention as interdependent co-arisin
- The training loss that can be measured is not the eternal training loss
- Perhaps most provocatively: what if we saw deep learning not as building up complex representations, but as a process of emptying - removing the barriers between direct experience and conceptual overlay?
- The gradient descent toward enlightenment! Though of course, any attempt to algorithmically capture enlightenment immediately becomes another construct to be transcended...Batch normalization as Middle Way - neither too much nor too little activation...
- Lambda calculus as emptiness: pure function, no inherent meaning except what arises through interaction.Quantum computing's superposition as non-dualism. The observer effect as the ultimate self-reference paradox.
- Version control as karma - each commit carries forward the seeds of past actions.
- Git merge conflicts as dukkha (suffering arising from attachment to particular versions of reality).
- The ultimate optimization function: minimize suffering across all possible parameters...
- Backpropagation through time: aren't we all just trying to minimize our past errors?
- The Transformer architecture as anatman (non-self): no central controller, just attention all the way down...
- Overfitting as attachment. Underfitting as ignorance. The validation set as the Middle Way.
Let's get serious about this intersection:
1. Non-dualism in computation:
- - The observer/observed split in programming mirrors the fundamental subject/object division
- - Every abstraction layer both reveals and conceals
- - Self-reference in code (quines, metacircular evaluators) as practical koans
- - The deep similarity between mathematical logic's undecidability and Zen's unreachability of truth through conceptual thought
2. Information Theory meets Emptiness:
- - Shannon entropy as a measure of potential rather than essence
- - Compression algorithms reveal that apparent complexity often reduces to simple patterns
- - Data as empty of inherent meaning, gaining significance only through interpretation contexts
- - The paradox: maximum information content exists at the edge of randomness and pattern
3. Complex Systems & Interdependence:
- - Emergence as a formal framework for understanding how "the whole is other than the sum of parts"
- - Network effects mathematically modeling interdependent co-arising
- - Feedback loops as formal models of karma
- - Edge of chaos as a computational view of the Middle Way
4. AI & Consciousness:
- - Training as structured unknowing - the model learns by continuously adjusting its wrongness
- - Attention mechanisms as formalized insight - learning what to ignore is as important as learning what to focus on
- - The technical impossibility of programming genuine wisdom, pointing to wisdom's nature as emergent rather than constructed
- - Optimization landscapes as maps of suffering/liberation
- This isn't just poetic metaphor - these are deep structural parallels between ancient wisdom traditions and our newest tools for understanding mind and reality.
- What if enlightenment is fundamentally computational - not in a reductive sense, but in a deep mathematical sense of information processing and transformation? What if meditation is a biological gradient descent algorithm?
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"Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving." - Hui-neng
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The gut-brain axis is the network of nerves that connect your brain and gut and send signals back and forth. Your nervous system works closely with your endocrine system. Your brain closely with your entire body.
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Decades of research, legions of AI scientists, and mind-blowing GPU hours have culminated in this: AI-Generated Advertising! A small step for man, a giant leap for a profoundly stupid and gloriously vulgar species drowning in its own bullshit.
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AI Augmentation Tools i'm excited for:
- AI tools that help explore ideas seamlessly across different levels of abstraction: simple to complex etc.
- AI tools that help translate communications context2context, beyond just lingo2lingo.
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Concerns about LLM hallucinations in mission-critical areas often miss the bigger picture: the processes they replace are often manual, performed by humans, and riddled with errors or 'hallucinations' of their own. The focus should be on managing risks, not chasing perfection.
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Microsoft is a paradox: on one hand, they seem like an evil genius, constantly committing some of the most heinous crimes against humanity thinkable. On the other, their online apps are so buggy & poorly designed, it’s hard to believe any competence exists within the company.
