Originally published by Vectors of Mind.
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:#
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:
Artificial Intelligence might be the last step in a 2000 year intellectual project: the naturalization of the mind as a dynamic mathematical object. This is the essence of the machine consciousness hypothesis.
- 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.
The Intrinsic Perspective
Over the weekend this essay of mine won 1st place and $5,000 in Scott Alexander’s anonymous book review contest, which was hosted at Astral Codex Ten.
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.
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:
Wow. @TheLancet has gone bonkers
It just ran a book review arguing that focusing on sperm/eggs as male/female is bad bcuz it promotes “gametic” bigotry, & so “fuels unhinged panic in some quarters about transgender threats to traditional gender roles”
This is a MEDICAL journal
Carole Hooven: 🧵1/4 A Harvard professor has just published a glowing review of Yale Professor Agustín Fuentes’ new book, Sex is a Spectrum, in The Lancet—one of the highest-ranked, most prestigious medical journals in the world. In it, she asserts that the “gametic definition” of sex—roughly,
Related, local hooligan banned:
Archived comment — Stetson:
I was permanently banned from the r/Anthropology subreddit because of the attached innocuous comment I made concerning Agustin Fuentes’ Sex is a Spectrum book.
Incredibly silly…
cc: @Colin Wright
Archived comment — Stetson:
Recent article in Cell Genomics reports widespread differences in sex-related patterns of gene expression (i.e. sex-DEs) in early brain development: 3,187 sex-DE genes or 18.1% of all genes of which 94.5% were autosomal. A large fraction of these difference persist into adulthood: 72.2% consistency of effect direction, Pearson’s r = 0.60. Additionally, both sex-chromosomal (including X inactivation escape) and hormonal factors (prenatal testosterone surge) contribute to these differences.
These findings were derived from RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) datasets from the early prenatal and adult forebrains (N = 266 & N = 434, respectively). They also contrast with This finding contrasts with recent evidence (2023) from Rodríguez-Montes and colleagues (PMID: 37917687) where sexual maturity was asserted as the crucial time point for the onset of sex-biased expression. However, this is likely accounted for by the improved sampling of the fetal timepoint by the current study. This study highlights the importance of intrinsic biological factors in driving differences in sex-associated brain phenotypes.
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:
Archived comment — Andrew Cutler:
Carl Sagan speculated the swastika is a prominent symbol in New and Old World cultures because it is a memory of a huge comet with a spinning tail. When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail
Archived comment — Andrew Cutler:
Neolithic Y Chromosome bottleneck is so bonkers. 17:1 ratio of female to male lines surviving a few thousand years. IMO, one of the greatest biases in academia is to keep things respectably boring. Nothing ever happens, even when the data screams of some sort of male apocalypse.
Archived comment — Andrew Cutler:
Why do you think agriculture was invented ~5 times independently at roughly the same time?
Archived comment — Andrew Cutler:
The Greeks said humans got technē (skill/technology) and aidōs (shame/reverence) together. Prometheus gives us fire and craft, but Zeus adds shame so we don’t destroy each other.
The Hebrews said the same: Adam & Eve awaken to shame, see their nakedness, leave Eden, and live by agriculture.
Notable that self-reflection would produce both technology and shame. Civilization began when we noticed our selves.
Archived comment — Andrew Cutler:
Medea, the snake priestess par excellence, was charmed by a bullroarer
Archived comment — Andrew Cutler:
One of my favorite “what did Freud see” examples is that he originally regarded narcissism as a homosexual disorder and indeed the modern Narcissism Personality Inventory is almost a standard deviation greater among homosexuals
