May Subscriber Post
I am once again asking you to consider the Sapient Paradox
I started a company in 2024 and scaling up has taken most of my creative energy. Bad for the blog, but good for my finances and, more importantly, the larger B2B SaaS economy. Trying to get back in the saddle writing, and I realize it’s been more than a year since the last link post. Unacceptable!
Previously on Vectors of Mind:
World Mythology Does Not Support The Out of Africa Migration
A provocative new paper claims our ancestors’ long walk out of Africa pruned not just their genes but their imaginations. The data, however, tell a different story.
Embryo Selection and Our Stone-Age Psychology
Note: I wrote this piece in 2023 for a now-defunct Substack specializing in embryo selection. It appears below unedited.
Are There Sex Differences in Self Awareness?
Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age, or an academic if men and women are different.
If Self-Awareness Is a Phase Change, There Was an Eve
Results of the Moments of Awakening survey, or, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
The Atman Question
GPT 5.5 was said to be fine tuned for creative writing. With a prompt it did a passable job
Venom & Valhalla
A commenter pointed out two episodes in Norse mythology where women use snake venom to give powers to men.
It's Hard to Be God
We are stardust, we are golden / We are billion-year-old carbon /And we got to get ourselves /Back to the garden ~Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Since man invented writing he has longed for a past of his own creation. The Epic of Gilgamesh opens with...
Writing for AI
“How can you write for LLMs so they listen to you? 2,400 years into the project of philosophy, we no longer hope to discover man was made in the image of God; but there is still hope to make God in the image of man.” ~Gwern
Convergent Evolution for Self-Domestication
Wherein I extend a paper by doing real experiments using ancient DNA. Turns out our ancestors were schizophrenic
Of all of these, It’s Hard to Be God is the most vital which anyone EToC curious should read. It’s the sort of idiosyncratic noetic history that I wish some Jaynesian had produced decades ago. Surely if consciousness is younger than the pyramids world mythology would be replete with stories of when the lights turned on. I make the case for the Greek Ages of Man (which hint at sex differences in the Silver Age).
On Substack
They say that after submitting your dissertation to the university’s library you should place a crisp $20 bill inside and come back years later to see if it’s still there. I’m grateful that someone read my dissertation (or at least the paper that came out of it), and is faithfully relaying it to the masses. Sebastian Jensen: The Big Five and the Lexical Hypothesis
Stetson reviews a book on the origin of language, going down the rabbit hole of global phoneme diversity. His article Phonemes and Genes is what prompted my World Mythology Does Not Support The Out of Africa Migration.
Scott Alexander is the GOAT because he can still pump out 30,000 words of high quality prose in a couple of weeks.
“I hope this post doesn’t inspire another round of “miracle believers TOTALLY DEVASTATED by IRREFUTABLE debunking”. I don’t think we have devastated the miracle believers. We have, at best, mildly irritated them. If we are lucky, we have posited a very tenuous, skeletal draft of a materialist explanation of Fatima that does not immediately collapse upon the slightest exposure to the data. It will be for the next century’s worth of scholars to flesh it out more fully.”
Big Think takes on the Sapient Paradox, accepting the false premise: “Although our genetic intelligence has changed little over the past 60,000 years, the way in which we apply that intelligence clearly has changed.” Even with that premise, cultural diffusion can go a long way explaining the data, as I argued in Memetic Eve Solves the Sapient Paradox.
Joscha Bach starts an institute to test the machine hypothesis of consciousness:
More ambitiously, Erik Hoel has started Bicameral Labs to test all theories of consciousness. Funny name for the project, no?
Notable that Hoel won the 2022 Astral Codex Ten book review contest, with an essay which argued the Sapient Paradox could be explained by the “gossip trap”, while I explain the Paradox with something like the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
This is your periodic reminder that the Sapient Paradox will continue to come into view as a mystery. Dwarkesh Patel recently discussed it with geneticist David Reich who described the independent invention of agriculture five times in the Holocene to be “unbelievable”. Those who have read EToC are in early to understanding how the Paradox is resolved. (Bonus: elsewhere in the interview Patel brought up Jaynes; I think he’d like the Snake Cult.)
Surfin’ the web
“Thou art wise, Enkidu, thou art become like a god!”
Check out this essay from 1970 comparing Eve and Shamhat. (Doctors recommend you read one pre-internet article a week to prevent brainrot.)
One of the popularizers of Bufo toad venom (5-meo-DMT) can be seen spinning a bullroarer during the ceremony (minute 18:08). Get this man some snake venom!
He claims to have revived a psychedelic tradition from an almost extinct tribe. A critical piece in the New Yorker at least corroborates the existence of the myth:
A few Seri people I spoke with said that they’d heard stories of a secret ancient toad-smoking practice. But, as Alberto Mellado Moreno, a historian from the Seri tribe, said, “It’s speculative even for us. Consider a society reconstructed from so few survivors. It’s impossible to know what might have been lost.”
Urim and Thummim n.
An ancient instrument or tool prepared by God and used by Joseph Smith to aid in the translation of the Book of Mormon.
At least that is the description (and image) from the LDS Church’s website. The Urim and Thummim were used as two lenses, a sort of old-timey Meta Rayband that allowed Joseph Smith to read the Reformed Egyptian script of the Native Americans (allegedly). I recently learned they are also important to the Rosecrucians. Since the theocracy in Utah was broken and the state was admitted to the Union, Mormons have aggressively rebranded as just another flavor of Protestant. However, they have deep roots in western esotericism which is the still-burning torch of the mystery cults of antiquity. I am partial to this being why Harold Bloom, a gnostic jew, found so much to like about early Mormonism:
“What is clear is that Smith and his apostles restated what Moshe Idel, our great living scholar of Kabbalah, persuades me was the archaic or original Jewish religion, a Judaism that preceded even the Yahwist…”
Peter Thiel’s take on LLMs as Antichrist echoes with my own:
“The Antichrist is, by definition, negative and dependent. It rejects Christ and Christian values while offering a spurious imitation of them. AI is a similarly dependent being. It is a simulacrum of human intelligence and language, capacities of thought and speech the Greeks called logos. But AI lacks essential elements of human logos: its embeddedness in the world through birth in a body bound for death, and the moral and intellectual interiority that makes the human being an image of God.”
CEO of DeepMind Demis Hassabis discusses Penrose’s theory of quantum consciousness (in passing). Apparently Penrose was surprised that a computer could learn Go, as he thought creativity required that special quantum sauce. Some evidence against his theory.
personalitymap.io allows you to search over a million correlations. Self-diagnosing schizophrenia is most correlated with a bad neighborhood. The Big Sort + paranoia?
Paper showing men have more schizophrenia: Variations in the Incidence of Schizophrenia: Data Versus Dogma.
“Anyway, sex is just a construct”
The Lancet—the medical journal with the highest Impact Factor—ran a piece defending sex as a continuum:
Related, local hooligan banned:
Notes
I’m not really an optimizer, so don’t know exactly how to use Notes for more than shooting the shit. Here have been some highlights for me: