Dr. Jeffery Martin on YouTube

Who is happy?

"So I think instead about how information technology will allow me to live forever, and then I feel happy." -apperception

"Who is happy?" -cmarti

Hm. Well, if we respond to each others' opinions with the classic Advaita paradox, we will have short discussions. Maybe better not to mix the categories of relative and absolute.

"Kenneth, with all due respect to your opinion and your personal relationship with Jeffery Martin, when you state that you are a "big fan" of someone like Jeffery you are providing a sort of endorsement. I think when you do that it's only fair that you present the full picture that you know of, and what you and I and others know is also that Martin is part fakir and BS artist, and that some of his supporters are dropping their original support due to legitimate questions about his claims to affiliation with Harvard, among other things." -cmarti

I see what you mean, Chris. My general impression of Jeffery is that I like and respect him and believe his research to be sound in spite of the fact that he misrepresented himself as a Harvard researcher when in fact his PhD was done at California Institute of Integral Studies. I wish he had not done so, as it did nothing to help his cause, but damaged his reputation (and rightly so; it's not cool to mislead people). As for why I say his research is sound, the three people on his doctoral committee were Allan Coombs, Ralph Hood, and Bernie Baars, all of whom are at the very top of their fields. The fact that they signed off on the dissertation is no small thing, as their reputations are also on the line.

I don't know much about the protocols for protecting the anonymity of research subjects, but I agree that Jeffery could have done a better job with that.

On balance, Jeffery is a tragically flawed human like the rest of us. As far as I know, he is sincere and his intentions good.

"
Who is happy?

"

I was. But then someone decided my comment was not valuable and my whole world caved in!

"As a singularitarian..."

What's a singularitarian?

Joke answer: it is someone who is so geeky that they will always be single.

Real answer: it is someone who believes there will be such a robust human-computer interface within this lifetime, so that human conciousness can and will be fully uploaded to a computer --- thus achieving full, rewarding immortal life... or having to spend all of eternity with only Paint, Calculator, and Solitare to pass the time.

Real, real answer: same as above, minus the last clause.

Jeffery Martin says in the interview
"In some sense fighting wars with drones now, instead of having tens or hundreds of thousands of people wiped out on battlefields over decades, which if you look back a few hundred years was pretty normal. So there do seem to be like these very positive trends."

So finding new, safer, and more intelligent ways to selectively kill and bomb people counts as a very positive trend...
I cringed a little when I heard him say that.

The Singularity -- there will come a time when computing power will be so great, and when computers will be able to self-design and self-replicate, that there will be no way to predict what will happen afterward. The term was coined by science fiction writer Verner Vinge and popularized by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who wrote a book called "The Singularity is Near." Kurzweil and his friend Peter Diamandis (the X Prize founder) created a private university on the NASA Ames Research Center campus in Mountain View, CA called "Singularity University." I attended that facility in April of this year. It was AMAZING.

Singulatarians may be Transhumanists, but not necessarily, and vice versa. Transhumanism is a different thing, separate. I have no idea which, if either, Jefferey Martin is.

I could go on for hours about the nature and status of our various exponential technologies, which is what Singularity University is all about.

"I don't know much about the protocols for protecting the anonymity of research subjects, but I agree that Jeffery could have done a better job with that.." -- Kenneth

Kenneth, I think you know enough to know that researchers should't misrepresent themselves to the extent Jeffery Martin has or expose their subjects to the extent Jeffery seems to do, at least in the pre-published work you and I have seen. It calls into question a lot of things about their work, which I have yet to see much of from Jeffery. Have you? He enjoys talking about it but where's the scholarly paper, or even the non-schoalrly paper? Do you have any idea where he stands on actually publishing something based on all the work he did when he interviewed you, me and all the others?

To be fair, I had a good time talking to Jeffery Martin. I liked him. I even helped him get his car out of the pound. It's been all the stuff that happens/doesn't happen afterward that has caused me to rethink him.

(BTW - my comment to Jim was a joke. I'll make it more clear and post a smiley next time.)

I think I should be more clear about why I am critical of Dr. Martin, beyond what I've already said. It's this -- I want a lot of serious research to go into wakening, meditation, and all related things. I would like to advance that idea among truly serious scientists of all kinds. To the extent that research in this area takes on the patina of "crank" and "crackpot" and comes across as being less than objective, I suspect serious academics might be less inclined to enter this field. I know, there *is* a lot of research going on in this area, for which I am very grateful. I just think people like Jeffery Martin appear to have slightly shady motives and practices, and that bothers me personally and from the perspective I just described.

Is the video all black for others after 17:57 or so?

i've never met anyone who didn't have good intentions from their own perspective, even when everyone else could say their actions were very harmful. infinite compassion and forgiveness doesn't have to mean never saying 'no'. i think firm boundaries and moral responsibility can co-exist with understanding, love, compassion, etc. thoughts?

I'd probably have some thoughts but I'm not sure how what you said relates to specifically this dialog - can you explain?

Sorry, I was referencing, but didn't quote, Kenneth's reply further upstream where he ended with: "On balance, Jeffery is a tragically flawed human like the rest of us. As far as I know, he is sincere and his intentions good."

(And then thinking of myriad circumstances in my own experience where I could say the same...)

For Jim:

chronicle.com/article/The-Strange-Neuroscience-of/132819

I'm feeling very in touch with my own glass house right now and not eager to start chucking stones around. Let's give this a rest.

Do you mean give the thread a rest, or the stone throwing? Cause I had one or two more comments brewing, not very critical. I mean just slightly critical. Hardly critical at all really. Not even a pebble.
Post 42. Ha!

We could pull specks out of each other's eyes instead.

Was there a point to this thread beyond publicly expressing the opinion that this guy is a ******** artist?
Genuinely curious.

B.

If you have to ask there's no point in telling

Who's asking?

""The Singularity is Near.""

Then why don't I have an iPhone yet!?

But seriously, thanks. Your explanation almost made sense to me.

I have mostly really like Martin's presentations and enjoyed his book (it was kind of wild and way out there though - but that's part of the reason I enjoyed it). I never saw any harm in what he does and liked that he was trying to collect some basic data on the population of awakened people.

That being said, as someone who has done an fair share of research, it is a serious problem when a participant's identity can be gathered from reporting the results. I don't know what his field is, but in Psychology a person can lose their license for that sort of thing.

Chris, I didn't gather whether you did it already, but you should let Martin know about this so he can correct it. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he may not have known how much he was revealing and would be thankful for the heads up.

Ron, the interviews in question took place well over a year ago, almost two, and the publication of the results hasn't happened in any official way that I know of (and I'm starting to doubt that it ever will be published). But yes, I absolutely made my opinion known to Jefferey in regard to the un-masked participant data.

BTW, Jefferey Martin's field is the study of "non-symbolic consciousness."

On the topic of machine consciousness, Martin casually predicts it will happen in his lifetime. What does he mean by that? That computers will have enough processing power and information to pass the Turing Test? Ray Kurzwell predicts computers will pass the Turing Test by 2029. To me that just means that in 2029 we have no way of proving that such a computer does NOT have consciousness. Does that mean that they HAVE consciousness?

I have a lot of fascination with this topic, because it gets into dharma questions such as "What is consciousness?" and "What is self?"

Some hardcore scientists classify consciousness, and the "self" that seems to inhabit human bodies as mere illusions. They see humans as meat machines, responding in various complex ways to their environment because of DNA and various electro-chemical processes. Why add this mystical idea of consciousness (or self) to a bunch of mechanical process that we can eventually represent and understand through complex equations?


I'll tell you what I predict. We'll all get fooled by A.I. sooner that we expect. I wonder if we may already have computer programs posting comments on Internet forums just like this one at Kennethfolk. As they get smarter we will interact with them before we realize it. Also some of those "ask a tech" or "ask an expert" email set ups will get handled by AI, while we think have reached a human. A few days ago I played around with my daughters i-phone which has Siri on it. I asked "her" Siri to do a few things and she fumbled, and misunderstood my requests. I called her a stupid B---- and asked her if she was retarded. (Just joking around with my daughter. Don't judge me). Siri responded:

"I'm only trying to help you."

(cont)