Abstraction's End
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Welcome

This is the personal website of Mariven, and the canonical source for my writings.

I try to understand the structure of intelligence, subjective experience, and abstraction, combining mathematical physics, neuroscience, philosophy, and introspective practices in the service of mega-scale conceptual engineering projects. My ultimate goal is to piece together the truth behind this reality, in order to most effectively find and do what is right; currently, this ~mostly means figuring out how to point artificial intelligence towards creating a better future.

To preserve intellectual freedom, I don't participate in -isms, but loosely align with what other people call consequentialistThere is only the state of the world, and morality
is found solely in one's effect on this. sentiocentristprioritization of all sentient life ethics, subjective Bayesian rationalist epistemology, and metaphysical naturalistthere is only matter acting according to
natural law, taking on various guises... but what perceives it? ontology.

A list of writings follows. Or, see my Thoughts page for shorter notes on topics of interest, from the causal structures underlying perception to the logic of quantum mechanics to the differential geometry of chakras.


Main Writings


A geometric formalism for intuiting the structures of optimization and inference, inspired by statistical mechanics.
Worldspace
Posted on November 27, 2023 (ver 0.1). Card image Phase portrait of the Lotka-Volterra equation. Source
A program for exploiting the conceptive nature of cognition in order to solve any solvable problem that can be cognized.
Every Canvas a Mirror
Posted on August 29, 2022 (ver 1.0). Card image Minjeong An, A Study on Pink Lens Effect.
An exploration of the ways in which concepts fail to bind to reality, and of reality's failure to fall into natural kinds.
Non-Kindness
Posted on October 9, 2022.
Exploring the sense-conceptive substrate of mathematical creativity.
Mathematical Intuition
Posted Dec. 5 2022. Card image Subgraphs of the complete graph on five vertices. Source.
Frameworks for producing theoretical solutions to the AI safety problem alongside practical deployment plans.
Indexical Bounding
Posted Oct. 2022. Card image M. C. Escher, Metamorphosis II.
Analyzing "phenomenal binding" in humans and AI; currently being massively rewritten in vivo.
Mental Subjects and Objects
Posted early Dec. 2023. Card image Neural connections in the mouse neocortex. Source.


Quantifying the logical structure of the AI safety problem to determine how it needs to be solved.
AI Safety is Team ∀
Posted on May 15, 2023.
A "literature review" regarding the uses and abuses of probability theory. Resources explaining why probability is difficult.
Probability is Difficult (Resources)
Posted on June 6, 2023. Card image Lissajous-like scarring of a quantum
probability density (source).
The causal articulation of the brain-body connection and its instrumental origins; hints at a theory of AI directability via manipulating internal causal structure.
Dreaming of Utility
Posted on June 15, 2023.
Genetic influences on personality traits are neither deterministic nor ignorable. Instead, they're like a poker hand.
Hands We're Dealt
Which tastes louder, honeydew or cheddar? Which feels deeper, a shaving cut or a tension headache? A potential method for Turing tests against modern LLMs.
Global Synesthetics
The consequences of an action depend on the scale of its implementation in a systematic way. Accounting for this looks like "renormalizing" moral judgements.
Moral Renormalization


Reference


An exhaustive report on our scientific understanding of the entire process of visual perception.
How We See
A first-principles approach to developing general relativity from differential geometry from spatial intuition.
Whence Relativity?
A systematic port and expansion of earlier writings that attempt to dissect the foundations of probabilistic inference.
On Inference