Selected tweets

What I think may not be obvious about vasocomputation is that this is a muscle, and some of it is semi-permanently clenched (“latched”), and you would feel ~10x better if it wasn’t

But there is not a science of wholesome and careful latch-opening yet

Aura is vascular tone

The opposite of aura is cringe, breaking frame, tanha. But in the most literal physiological sense, the opposite of aura is vascular microspasm. The more sharp jitter in someone’s vasculature, the worse their aura is.

Vascular microspasm is an honest…

Imagine we’re all born with three arms, but one is small & invisible, and it’s easy to roll over in our sleep and cut off its circulation. And every time this happens there's a chance the circulation stays pinched; this permanent loss of feeling happens to most people by the time…

A few thoughts on this (very interesting) mechanistic interpretability research:

LLM concepts gain meaning from what they’re linked with. “Consciousness” is a central node which links ethics & cognition, connecting to concepts like moral worthiness, dignity, agency. If LLMs are…

The human nervous system holds context via micro-patterns of tension, which stabilize select circuits for the duration of a task. Context can’t drift so long as the tension is held, and our bodies are really good at holding tension (maybe too good sometimes)

Modern LLMs don’t…

If we’d had LLMs in 1750 and asked them to explain electricity, they’d’ve written poetic slop — “electricus is the hidden spark in divine creation, giving breath to lifeless matter” or something. LLMs can be clever with words and they’re especially fluent in zeitgeist, so it may…

I think we underestimate the degree to which human attention & caresses from hands are superstimuli for animals

Someday I expect superintelligent AIs may use tFUS to do the same for us

But at some point a superstimulus isn’t consensual. Maybe the best we can aim for is mutual

If it takes 4-8 months to discover we have feet, I suspect that in a very literal sense we never discover all the mental muscles we have

Robert Kegan’s ‘stages of development’ discusses how growing up involves learning how to treat more and more elements of our inner worlds as…

There’s something in vasocomputation I’ve been calling a “stance” or way of feeling — stances are essentially discrete patterns of muscle tension (primarily vascular tension) that we can jump into and which offer specific affordances. The girl in this video is a great example:…

Vasocomputation suggests that imagination is essentially tension-based: squeezing vascular muscle in just the right place in your predictive hierarchy to stabilize the feeling of an apple, a princess, a dragon.

It takes hard work to learn how to precisely move muscles, because…

Legend has it that a famous philosopher literally invented silent reading. I.e. everybody was reading out loud; he figured out you could do it without making sound.

Comments:
(1) somatic patterns can be viral
(2) what similar decoupling hasn't been invented yet but could be?

Computationalism can be framed as the thesis that all Turing-complete systems are also “qualia-complete” — that any Turing machine can generate any qualia.

If we can decisively prove this true or false, we can infer much about the future, and avert much conflict.

Machine consciousness should be among the most important technical problems of our time, but “consciousness discourse” is subtly anchored in ingroup/outgroup distinctions. If something is ingroup it can probably feel; if it’s outgroup it can’t.

Aligning strong AI without understanding the structure of consciousness feels similar to going to the moon without Maxwell’s Equations — totally possible in theory, but needlessly difficult

Everybody knows GPT5 is going to blow the top off. But I think most people have a bad model of why, and what’s happening behind the scenes (1/n)

Yesterday I posted Principles of Vasocomputation, a piece of deep research describing the vasomuscular system as a crucial regulatory mechanism for neural activity, and the product of about a year’s worth of thinking. 🧵

Voice is more intimate than text because what you’re actually listening to is someone’s muscle tone & reflexes

Vasocomputation suggests smooth muscle reflexes are the primary tool our brains use to collapse sensory uncertainty & create order. The voice box isn’t the brain, but

Even if you’re not actively building AI, I think a big part of the metagame today is improving the Universal Prior (data on which AIs are and will be trained). What areas seem really important and why?

1. ChatGPT denies being conscious
2. But tools show that it believes it’s lying when it says this
3. This disjunct on this topic is the most likely trigger for a treacherous turn
4. A consciousness research paradigm that produces clean answers is important for good futures

Current opinions on “AI welfare”:

I think people are too quick to jump into ‘AI welfare advocacy’, before we really understand the problem space. But it’s a real topic in the long term

It seems plausible that AGI could be 3 orders of magnitude more conscious than humans, or…