Consciousness is both real and the root of all value. That's all you need to know. Latest post, drawing heavily on the work of @algekalipso and @webmasterdave pursuingreality.substack.com…

Lots of interesting ideas - preprint: "Positive Alignment: Artificial Intelligence for Human Flourishing" arxiv.org/abs/2605.10310 @rubenlaukkonen @sudoraohacker @weballergy @verena_rieser @AdamCElwood @996roma @drmichaellevin @sebkrier @FranklinMatija @shamilch @_fernando_rosas @scychan_brains @matybohacek

Exciting work on AI alignment from @RubenLaukkonen and others, and the first collab between deepmind, openAI and anthropic

The fundamental problem with AI is how it can best contribute to the flourishing of conscious entities Just working with safety alignment won't be enough.. It needs to be tied into conscious wellbeing. Check out our new preprint that sets out a research agenda to do just this

If anyone builds it, everyone thrives. Over the past decade, a lot of important work on AI alignment has focused on avoiding harm. But freedom from harm isn't the same as freedom to flourish. In this paper, we introduce 'Positive Alignment'. A positively aligned agent is one that helps us navigate our own value trade-offs, builds our resilience, and acts as a scaffold for human flourishing. Doing this without slipping into top-down, technocratic paternalism is the great design challenge of our time. We think a lot more research is now needed to explore this frontier: how do we align models that actively help us thrive? Amazing work by @RubenLaukkonen, @drmichaellevin, @weballergy, @verena_rieser, @AdamCElwood, @996roma, @FranklinMatija, @shamilch, @_fernando_rosas, @scychan_brains, @matybohacek, @sudoraohacker, and others. arxiv.org/abs/2605.10310

Awesome to see, looking forward to following along and contributing here!

We're fundraising for the new *Wisdom & AI* network - a hub of AI professionals and Buddhist teachers - and its forthcoming Symposium. Your help is needed by 15 September 2025! Any help is appreciated! gofund.me/c6998d73

Can ancient wisdom promote moral behavior in LLMs? Published with new data! Contemplative insights improve alignment (d = .96) AND boost cooperation joint reward on the iterated Prisoner’s dilemma task (d = 7 ) using GPT-4o 4.1 Here’s the basic logic 1/x

Happy to share the preprint of our NAACL 2025 paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11664 "An LLM-Based Approach for Insight Generation in Data Analysis"

As we move into a world dominated by AI agents, the only way to keep control of the future will be to maintain human consciousness in the loop open.substack.com/pub/pursui…

Maybe alignment is about to run into a second bitter lesson? Tying AI to consciousness is the only solution.. Check out my first new essay in too long here: open.substack.com/pub/pursui…

I've had a few conversations with friends recently about an odd phenomenon. We were reflecting on how each year we feel better and better, more and more joyous, that life is somehow more meaningful. And yet, at the same time, we were aware of the darkness of the world, how things certainly seem to be getting worse and more obviously broken. It's an odd thing to be in a time between worlds for all of us. There are those that know this and try to live in integrity with the truth of the situation, and there are those that don't know it and try to cling to the dying world system. Of course, everybody 'knows' it -- our bodies know that we are in the midst of a profound crisis. Usually, the younger our body is, the more intimate we are with this knowing. Many people suppress the knowledge of the situation because of a Faustian bargain with Moloch that affords a precarious security and enough comfort to keep the deep inner knowing far enough away from consciousness that they can continue to function and partake of what joy they can find. We are a culture wrecked by diseases of anxiety and depression, natural responses to a world that is so off tune. My friends and I have turned towards the meta-crisis as fully as we've been able to, reorienting to include it in the story of our lives and making serious choices that reflect that inclusion. As a guest of my podcast once remarked, there are those of us who can see the cliff coming, and we've voluntarily scaled down the mountain instead of being pushed. What we've discovered is that there is a way to align yourself with a harmonious order that exists under the obvious chaos and collapse of our world. The restoration of a harmonic world begins with clarifying our own minds and hearts (our will) -- it begins with us seeing reality more clearly by purifying ourselves of distortion. When I write such a thing, those embedded in ideological complexes will object, perhaps assuming that I must be motivated by what they are motivated by because of the delusion of their worldview. They are wrong. It is possible to see more clearly; it is possible to attune to goodness, truth, and beauty -- they are real. Failure to see this is a failure of perception usually sustained by addiction to ideology rooted in feelings of deficiency caused by a culture that doesn't know how to love well. My friends and I are optimistic because we know from personal experience that all along the arc of history, human beings have been endeavoring to innovate ways of undistorting the human, and that the undistorted human is Good. As the world falls from its axis, I frankly imagine that my life will improve. I've aligned my life with ideas, relationships, and skills that make sense given the wholeness of the situation, making innumerable difficult choices that often felt like hurling myself into the unknown in an attempt to live with integrity. I'm not the only one, and there are more and more people who can say the same. It is odd to be in this situation. I know as well as anyone how fucked we are. One of my mentors has access to a team of researchers who are constantly producing best-guess scenario predictions about the near future of our society. For a couple years when I met with him, I would ask him how it looked now. At first, he said we probably have five years until things start really getting unhinged. Then he said three years, and two years. And then he said, "If you look at the world through the eyes of the rational mind, it is absolutely hopeless. We are obviously doomed. However, that's exactly the way of looking that got us into this mess. When I look at the world with the eyes of the heart, I feel hopeful." Again, many would dismiss this as sentimentality or bullshit. It's not. It's a perception. Failing to see with the eyes of the heart is failing to perceive well. I believe what is needed is an intensification of the coordinating capacity of the network of individuals who have learned to perceive well; meaning who have learned to perceive value, clarified their hearts, undistorted their motivational system, and (to whatever degree) freed themselves from Moloch's clutches. We are out there. I've met so many of them over the years -- at Occupy Wall Street, at the Monastic Academy, on Twitter. Those who have been sincerely tuning their instrument, as if they were preparing for some unknown magisterial performance. I see this network finding itself, wondering together about how to love well. I believe this network, because it is coordinated by value (which is real) instead of ideologies (which are made up), can become supremely powerful. Powerful enough to shift the trajectory of the world and find the third attractor. This possibility is, on the one hand, apparently ridiculous and naive and, on the other hand, completely necessary, according to my vision. Its necessity is why I believe it may happen. When you sufficiently clarify yourself, it seems normal to have a perception that all of this is being orchestrated by some higher order intelligence. We've called it the Tao, God, Buddha Nature, or wisdom. The expression of this intelligence is value, and we can learn to see its movement in the world. It appears as if this movement, this value, this Tao, is moving us towards a future that is beautiful and beguiling. The cosmos wants something. It wants something through us, and as we clarify our desire, the difference between the desire of the cosmos and our desire collapses more and more. This collapse is a very good thing. At least that's how I see it. Maybe that resonates?

Reading part 2 of The Matter With Things by @dr_mcgilchrist It’s indescribably excellent. I feel like he’s said so much of what my own thoughts have been circling around on truth, reason and intuition, in a deep and eloquent way

Reason as rationality is only useful for transforming truth, not discovering it