A new technology, virtual embodiment, challenges our understanding of who we are | Hacker News Reader

A new technology, virtual embodiment, challenges our understanding of who we are

newyorker.com

65 pointsehudla17 comments

As someone with chronic sleep paralysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis), it is astonishing how frequently I read about pseudo-paranormal or "OBE" experiences and go, yeah, that's just sleep paralysis man.

Although, the causes of sleep paralysis still aren't well understood, so maybe it's a VR bug after all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Same, I’ve had sleep paralysis for as long as I can remember. A lot of stories of alien abduction, out-of-body experiences, mystical visitations by nightmares and demons, &c. strike me as plainly SP. Learning that it’s a normal sleep disorder made the experience less frightening and confusing, and kept me from falling into the trap of thinking of it as supernatural. Now if I have an episode I just relax and wait for it to be over. I haven’t had one in a long while, though, by avoiding triggers such as sleep deprivation, stress, alcohol, and sleeping on my back. Unfortunately, that also means I have to avoid lucid dreams, which are closely related—and yet as far as I’ve seen, this connection is rarely talked about except by the lucid dreaming community (also often rather mystical and full of woo).

I've had SP a few times, more often on the couch than in bed for some reason. A friend that has these experiences very often gave me his pro tip for dealing with them, as soon as you realize you're having SP, simply use all of your will to bend your index finger, the second you get your finger to bend, you snap out of it. Worked for me the few times I've had to use it, and it gives you something to focus on at the same time.

Sure, different things work better for different people, and that method is certainly worth a try, as I’ve heard it works for many people with SP. Fighting it tends to just make it worse for me—usually giving me a false awakening after which I often wake up paralysed again, sometimes two or three times. Sometimes it does help to try to regain control of my breathing—a big part of the anxiety for me is being “stuck on auto”. Could be related to sleep apnea, dunno.

I sometimes get SP (couple times a year max) given long sessions of programming, sleep deprivation, weakened immune system. part of me recognizes them and is able to "step aside" while mind stays busy generating colorful "wannabe frightening" pictures. whole thing reminds me muscle pain after hard workout but for the brain. most peculiar thing is that body sort of associates fear with liberation.

Yeah, the whole time I was reading that section I was thinking the article was just going to be based on quackery that could easily be explained by sleep paralysis and stimulating brain regions responsible for proprioception. The sudden turn into utilizing it for VR was unexpected and quite interesting.

This is a fascinating and frightening technology. Used altruistically, this can heal a lot of people and prejudices. But how long until people use it to reinforce their own prejudices, simulate dehumanizing scenarios, or force it on others as sci-fi-level brainwashing form of propaganda?

I'm working my way through Being No One at the moment. It's very interesting, and (to me, anyway) sounds like he's on the right track with his 'transparent self-model' understanding of consciousness.

Interestingly a lot of robotics seems to work the same way - the robot has a model of itself and the world around it, and when it "looks at the world" it's actually looking at that model.

It's also worth reflecting on your model of reality and color. RF wavelengths vary along a single dimension, the wavelength. But we perceive red, green and blue. Sometimes we don't perceive the wavelength if it's outside our visual range, it never is mapped into the model, unless we lift it into visual range with sensors (IR) or dig into it through the analytical mind.

It's actually quite scary if you think too much about it - what we 'see' and 'hear' and 'feel' as our nice neat comprehensible rectilinear 3D world with directional audio and consistent textures and shapes etc. is nothing like what's "really" there, there's just a 2-way mapping between our model and "reality". All that's really there is an invisible hot soupy sea of quarks fizzing around at ludicrous speed.

There is a certain sense in which one has never actually interacted with anything other than one's own brain. It's not the only sense of things, but it's one.

> the robot has a model of itself and the world around it, and when it "looks at the world" it's actually looking at that model.

So do you! Perception is a bayesian inference problem! Maybe the actual state of the world is x, but you observe the latent z (eg photoreceptor output) which is related to x in some complicated way. What you are doing when you look at a scene and understand what's going on is inferring what underlying state of the world is most likely to have generated your observation!

Theoretical neuro gets one surprisingly far in terms of gaining insight about the self. For instance, I'm a big sucker for the sampling hypothesis, which says basically that thinking is the process of drawing samples from the posterior p(x | z), states of the world which are likely to have generated your observation.

You have your latent and observed variables reversed. The former is `z`, the latter is `x`.

;-)

> the robot has a model of itself and the world around it, and when it "looks at the world" it's actually looking at that model.

That would be the classical "sense, plan, act" approach to AI. There is also a whole array of more "reactive" solutions, that only relies on sensor inputs without building any world model. Brooks' "Intelligence without reason" [^1] is probably one of the best papers out there in describing how this way is better suited to build complex robotic/AI systems and apply them to real-world scenarios.

[^1]: http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/AIM-1293.pdf

This reminds me of the time when I lost my sense of self for a moment, that suddenly the world was just kind of happening and I had no precedent over the cars passing, everything being quite equal. I guess it was a bit of ego-death without any drugs or meditation.

Also interesting that the author mentioned Emptiness. I couldn't help but be reminded of Zen throughout.

It looks like we can finally simulate the experience of this classic: http://pbfcomics.com/comics/freaking_vortex/

Finally, the truth of a fridge magnet I've had since last century makes itself apparent: I'M NOT MYSELF TODAY — MAYBE I'M YOU

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