Abstraction's End
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Welcome


This is the canonical website for !c{my}{(Mariven)} writings. Trim the URL and you'll find my old site; while it was powered by Notion, this site was built from scratch If you're not using a modern browser on desktop, you may as well start praying now. as an ideal platform for long-form writing.

Mainly, I try to understand the structure of intelligence and the nature of abstraction, in the hope of (or, on the warpath towards) a fundamentally better world. I (really) enjoy mathematics and physics, and often find it extremely fruitful to put those ways of thinking to task towards other ends via (really) in-depth conceptual engineering projects. The ultimate goal is to find the truth of reality that I might be as effective as I can at doing what is right; currently, this ~mostly means making sure that artificial intelligence is pointed towards creating a better future rather than a blank one.

I can't really claim to follow any brand-name school of thought, but my own is reminiscent of what other people call a !c{consequentialist}{There is only the state of the world, and morality
is found solely in one's effect on this.} !c{sentiocentrist}{prioritization of all sentient life} I'm not an !c{Effective Altruist}{(this was written prior to FTX! and only expresses
my antipathy towards identifying with -isms;
affectively, I very strongly support EA)}—instead, you can call me an Ethical Actualist, taking it to imply many of the same viewpoints and conclusions, but not the same community or culture. morality, a subjective Bayesian rationalist epistemology, and a !c{metaphysical naturalist}{there is only matter acting according to
natural law, taking on various guises... but what perceives it?} ontology. But such artificial labels are never binding and never complete.

A list of writings follows. The blocks that are filled in lead to things you can read. Or, see the Thoughts page for lots of shorter notes on things 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