Is the universe a computer? (with Joscha Bach)

1. Gain Agency Over Self-Narratives

Reduce suffering by understanding that it often stems from trying to control the uncontrollable or from narratives we adhere to. Gain agency by making your self-stories more truthful and relevant, thereby lessening the impact of external events.

2. Decouple Pain from Narrative

To alleviate suffering, practice separating the raw sensation of pain from the stories or judgments you attach to it, such as “this is bad.” By viewing pain as a neutral sensation, you can reduce the associated suffering.

3. Abstract Emotional Pain

When facing intense emotional pain, elevate your perspective to a higher level of abstraction to understand the true situation, including others’ viewpoints and your own role, rather than projecting. This deeper understanding can help dissolve the pain.

4. Write to Escape Thought Loops

To overcome emotional thought loops and access higher-level understanding, write out all your thoughts and feelings. This practice helps quiet the mind, prevents circular thinking, and enables you to move to a new level of description.

5. Elevate Disagreement Resolution

To effectively resolve disagreements, particularly political ones, ascend at least two levels of abstraction beyond the immediate conflict. Focus on understanding the underlying values that shape each person’s opinion and how those values were formed.

6. Challenge In-Group Bias

Actively question the belief that your in-group possesses all correct answers and that out-groups are inherently problematic. Instead, strive to identify valuable insights and positive aspects within diverse worldviews for a more accurate understanding.

7. Build Love on Shared Purpose

Develop a deeper, more sustainable love by prioritizing shared purposes and a mutual sense of sacredness, alongside practical negotiation skills for daily life. This approach fosters a connection beyond mere infatuation.

8. Prioritize Causal Structure Discovery

When learning or analyzing, prioritize discovering the causal structures and underlying systems that produce observed patterns, rather than merely recognizing correlations. This approach mirrors human understanding and leads to deeper insights.

9. Information Meaning is Relational

Recognize that the meaning of information is inherently tied to its relationship with change and other pieces of information. This insight can guide how one interprets and processes data to derive deeper understanding.

10. Define Intelligence as Modeling

Understand intelligence as the ability to make models, which is distinct from being rational, smart, or wise, and serves the purpose of control. This perspective helps in discerning what true intelligence entails.

11. Assess Intelligence Multidimensionally

When evaluating intelligence, consider multiple dimensions such as autonomy, embodiment, reasoning, language, collaboration, and learning, instead of a single metric. This approach offers a more comprehensive and accurate picture of an intelligent system’s capabilities.

12. AI for Human Self-Understanding

Engage with AI development not just for technological advancement, but as a means to understand human consciousness. By building models that fall short of human minds, we gain profound insights into what our minds truly are and are not.

13. Test Programming for Cognitive Prediction

To gauge future cognitive performance, assess a child’s ability to write programming code from scratch, even without prior training. This task can serve as a strong predictor for later cognitive capabilities.

14. Embrace Computational Philosophy

Approach philosophical inquiry with a computational understanding of semantics, recognizing that truth is a stateful notion dependent on the procedure of its acquisition, not a static, platonic concept. This perspective can resolve inherent contradictions in traditional philosophical language.

15. Rethink Language for Consistency

Re-evaluate how language is constructed and what it can express, particularly concerning concepts like infinity, to prevent self-contradictions. Languages that treat infinities as existing entities can become inherently inconsistent.

16. Existence as Implementation

Adopt the perspective that something exists to the degree that it is implemented, whether it’s an abstract concept or a physical entity. This framework helps clarify the nature of reality and how we define what is “real.”