LawrenceKerr

It's pretty easy. If you're the type of person who rarely dreams, it takes about a month or so.

First consciously cultivate interest in your own dreams (through dream journaling, and consciously looking forward to your dreams before sleep). That's the basis.

Then, if it doesn't happen spontaneously, to force a breakthrough you can always set multiple alarms (tip: a smart watch with a vibratory alarm, or... make a baby), to wake yourself and keep yourself on the edge of sleep - into that hypnopompic state (between 2-4 AM works best for most people). It takes a lot of effort, concentration & patience. The only thing about this way of entering a lucid dream, is that you're likely to consciously experience sleep paralysis first, and many people don't like that even though it's harmless and a perfect gateway into lucid dreams.

Did you ever try though? Did you try to initiate a lucid dream with the conscious intention of recalling your waking state?

A lot of limits in lucid dreams are entirely self-imposed and often broken through or bypassed with conscious intention.

I participated in lucid dream research years ago, and definitely could recall exactly where I was sleeping and more details about my waking state, while executing the experiment task inside the lucid dream.

How can you "safely say that it has failed"? Bitcoin is in the top 10 largest assets in the world, just below silver. I think few people would've expected that 15 years ago. That's a pretty high bar you're setting.

The (centralized) part you put in brackets is quite important. That's the differentiator.

Both systems can obviously co-exist. Much like how gold co-exists with fiat money. Or how there's bittorrent and S3.

And it is true the adoption part is still tiny (just equivalent to one of the top S&P500 companies in market cap) compared to its potential. And the numbers show that as adoption increases, volatility goes down.

Except for it creating the possibility of transferring wealth digitally, to anyone, across borders, without any centralized intermediary you have to trust. That's pretty amazing, especially for people who live unbanked, or in hyperinflationary economies with totalitarian governments.

Can we deduce from your comment that you are in fact, not conscious?

We all know what it's like to be conscious (I presume - my theory of mind is intact but may be flawed). It's obviously the quality of being, i.e. experiencing qualia.

And since we as human beings are conscious, it stands to reason that there are probably other living beings (or matter in general) who are not. (Living) matter that doesn't experience the world, basically. No frame of reference. Unless you believe in panpsychism; then everything is conscious and we can ask ourselves what it's like to be a rock.

It's just that the hard problem of consciousness states that we haven't been able to define this "state" in its exact physical, neural correlates, but just because we haven't been able to do that yet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It quite literally is the only thing we can know for sure exists, because otherwise no one would be there to ask or hear the question to begin with.

And sure, you can try to break it down into behavior and other properties of a living being, but that is simply side-stepping the hard problem and just ignoring the question of qualia.

Then again, there's something like "aphantasia": some people do not have the capacity to mentally visualize anything, and often aren't even aware of that themselves. I can imagine there's something analogous with the quality of consciousness, i.e. literal "NPCs" who do not experience the world from a frame of reference, but are basically non-sentient, human, autonomous agents. That's just a very dangerous line of thought, so don't take that too seriously :)

James Randi was notoriously biased, stubborn, and dismissive of any evidence contrary towards his views.

His Million Dollar Challenge has been criticized for its lack of transparency and fairness. The challenge was not conducted under the auspices of an impartial third party. Instead, only Randi himself and his organization set the conditions and judged the outcomes. This raises questions about bias, as Randi had a vested interest in maintaining his stance that psi phenomena do not exist.

Despite the fact that several participants in the Stargate Project, such as remote viewer Ingo Swann, produced results that were statistically significant under controlled conditions, Randi dismissed these findings outright. He did not engage with the data or attempt to replicate the experiments. Instead, he simply declared that because psi phenomena _cannot exist according to his understanding of the laws of physics_, any positive results must be due to fraud or error.

Furthermore, Randi's challenge required 100% success rate for claimants to win the prize. In any scientific experiment, such a requirement is unreasonable as it does not account for statistical variance. Even established scientific phenomena cannot always be demonstrated with 100% accuracy due to various factors such as measurement errors or environmental influences.

Lastly, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The fact that no one claimed Randi's prize does not conclusively prove that psi phenomena do not exist. It could simply mean that the conditions set for the challenge were too stringent or biased. Or... the sheep-goat effect really does exist, and the attitude & beliefs of the experimenter affect the result.

The Stargate Project remains one of the most intriguing government and intelligence programs, I think, because of its casual admittance of the use of psi and remote viewing in intelligence operations for over two decades.

The review of the project downplays statistically significant results as potential methodological flaws or even outright fraud. Not surprising, given the die-hard skepticism and stigma that has surrounded psychic phenomena since the '90s. Dr. Utts, who literally wrote university textbooks on statistics and was part of the evaluation study when the program was terminated, still firmly disagrees with the conclusions to this day.

For those who keep an open mind, it's interesting to note the sheep/goat effect documented in recent parapsychological research, which suggests that a person's bias significantly influences outcomes in psi studies. A 2023 study published in Brain and Behavior again highlighted this effect (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/brb3.3026).

To a hardened skeptic this will sound like the ultimate cop-out for difficulties in reproducibility, but if you think about it, it really is fundamental to the idea of psi. Assume a reality model where anomalous cognition is indeed possible (some "anomalous" link between consciousness and the world outside the physical body), then a person's beliefs will naturally influence their perceptions. This is, of course, a major challenge to traditional scientific views, which assume (but rarely admit or even realize) a strictly Descartian split between the observer (consciousness) from the observed. Therefore, it is easier to ignore or ridicule rather than investigating deeper.

I really believe there's so much more to this story and that this will be gradually unearthed (hopefully) within the next years/decades.

Ideally these things should be subsidized or at least run on generous donations, yes. But quality matters most to me. I'd happily pay for educational software that is proven to be better (more engaging, more fun, better learning outcomes) than free & open-source alternatives.

What do you mean it's a red herring and doesn't exist?

It's quite literally the only "thing" we can be sure exists, because without consciousness, we wouldn't experience anything at all.

I agree we care mainly about increasing information complexity in AI systems, but we can't discount the possiblity of consciousness being generated non-biologically in the process. I think we just need a better model of what that means exactly.

So would you posit an LLM which self-updates (retrains) its internal model after every prompt-response (perhaps at night, when it dreams of electric sheep) is conscious because it shows some recursive self-reflection & decision making? (And/or add in active inference as described by Karl Friston, whereby it tries to predict outcomes and self-correct its model)

If you knew the LLM does this after every prompt, is that a sufficient condition for possibly concluding that it's conscious? And if this recursion is not enough, what is? What's the missing piece?

>Consciousness doesn't matter. My phone is conscious when its battery is low.

Those are interesting claims...

I know this isn’t a topic that would do well in the typical HN crowd, but, just in case someone out there shares my passion: I am working on “technoetic” projects.

That word, “technoetics”, beautifully encapsulates what I find most interesting: the exploration of consciousness through technological means.

My ambition would be to merge “maker culture” with fringe topics related to parapsychology, anomalous cognition (remote viewing), mind-matter interaction, … in a kind of open-minded and curious yet self-aware, artful, playful, and not-so-serious way.

To make it a little more specific but probably still very cryptic to anyone not familiar with this: I am working on software to support various “psi” experiments. For example, I want to make it really easy to do timestamped ARV-based predictions of future outcomes.

I don’t have anything to show publicly right now, but feel free to comment or reach out via mail (see profile) if this piques your interest too.