May Subscriber Post

Platonic Representation Hypothesis, gender wars, and VoM in the wild

Temple of Isis frescoe at Pompeii. Notice the cobra.

If you haven’t taken it, please check out the Moments of Awakening survey. I’ll post it on Reddit and X shortly to get a larger sample (please share with friends), but for now it doubles as a way to learn about VoM readers. For example, half of you have a graduate degree, and, after White, the most common ethnicity is Jewish (at 13%).

Previously on Vectors of Mind

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Links

• The Mind of God | Dan Ackerfeld (Substack). Dan develops some ideas about Idealism we played around with in the podcast More Than Allegory.

• Are Men and Women Different? | Fake Nous (Substack)

• If that presents the theory, then the praxis is this wildly popular article “what women don’t understand about men”.

• The Joy Is Not Optional | Aella (Substack). Child abuse framed in terms of consciousness.

• Ancient DNA shows Stone Age Europeans voyaged by sea to Africa | Nature

• The Mystery of the World’s Oldest Writing System Remained Unsolved Until Four Competitive Scholars Raced to Decipher It | Smithsonian Mag

• Great Tree of Religion (a phylogeny going back to The Beginning)

• Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him 200 Times | NYT

• Is Hereditarianism Wrong? | East Hunter (Substack)

• AI Timeline (a brief history)

• State of play of AI progress (and related brakes on an intelligence explosion) | Interconnects (Substack). “AI will make a ton of progress, but it will not be an obvious acceleration.”

• Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddings | arXiv. Evidence for the Platonic Representation Hypothesis: different language models learn the same representations of words. This was something I noticed when researching personality structure in language models. The models that do better on traditional ML benchmarks did better on producing a Big Five like structure, even when the models were very different.

• Ymir in India, China—and Beyond. Cultures in Europe, Asia, and Polynesia say the earth was made by carving up the primordial giant. Miachel Witzel argues this is a Paleolithic myth, widely diffused.

• Terance Mckenna’s brother Dennis discusses snake venom as an entheogen back in 2008. Amazingly, he found out about Indian snake dens before it hit the scientific literature. (Episode 35, at the 32 minute mark.)

• Employee’s Change Caused xAI’s Chatbot to Veer Into South African Politics | NYT. For a day Grok was obsessed with white genocide in South Africa, a dark shadow of Golden Gate Claude. In the end Musk blamed a “rogue employee.” Check out the Grok’s response to the tweet, “The earth looks like this and people thing they are here to study for tests and work under artificial light all day…”

  

Short doc on the sapient paradox in the Americas, though it is never named. There were humans before Clovis culture 13,000 years ago, but in terms of culture they left not so much as a bead. No art, and only a few hints of stone tools so primitive some argue they are just fallen rocks or tools made by monkeys. EToC explains this.

“And it’s just: why don’t we have this huge spread of tools for people 20,000 years ago? If they were in White Sands, if they made it to Brazil, why can’t we find their tools? Why aren’t their tools as common as this? I don’t know. I don’t know. Why—think about that. I mean, I think it’s certainly possible that I was looking at the earliest Australian sites the other day, and a lot of these people seem to only really use, like, pretty—you know—their stone flakes that are clearly made by people, but, like, they’re simple tools, right?”

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VoM in the wild:

The Snake Cult of Consciousness Two Years Later on r/slatestarcodex. My framing:

Two years ago, Scott linked my essay that proposed the concept of “self” was discovered and diffused memetically via psychedelic ritual. This, I argue, led to a fundamental change in human psychology and is remembered in the world’s creation myths. In this follow-up, I review some of those predictions. Is snake venom an entheogen? How widespread was its use? Did a mystery cult diffuse worldwide around the end of the Ice Age? Does anyone mainstream argue such a gene-culture interaction could explain the evolution of metacognition? (Yes)

Michael Smith on X discusses the evolution of the ego (and what to do about it).

“I'm guessing THE absolute super duper huge advantage humans got over the rest of the biosphere is mental time travel. We learned how to structure our relationship to time so that we could make arbitrary plans & coordinate w/ each other about them. All else is footnotes.”

The people on X were NOT having my claim that women were human first.

Moments of awakening

As he is wont, Scott does a good job summarizing a bunch of text from around the internet, this time about people’s first memories:

Moments Of Awakening

A number of people say their first memory is becoming conscious:

mandziypat

A post shared by @mandziypat

Including Grimes:

One of the top comments: “I gained conciousness while staring at a mosaic tapestry my teacher had hung on the wall and just started to quietly spiral while staring at it for the rest of class, fun times” May I introduce you to how they did it in the Paleolithic?

Carved mammoth ivory plaque, use unkown

The flip side:

IYKYK