I mean disposing yourself so that incoming information is updated on. To avoid thrashing, you need some way of smoothing things out; some way to make it so that you don’t keep switching contexts (on all scales), and so that switching contexts isn’t so costly. The predictive processing way is to ignore information insofar as you can get away with it. The straw Bayesian way is to just never do anything because it might be the wrong plan and you should think about whether it’s wrong before you do anything. These options are fundamentally flawed and aren’t the only two options, e.g. you can explicitly try to execute your plans in a way that makes it useful to have done the first half of the plan without doing the second (e.g. building skills, gaining general understanding, doing the math, etc.); and e.g. you can make explicit your cruxes for whether this plan is worthwhile so that you can jump on opportunities to get future cruxy information.
I think you are assuming that one is consciously aware of the fact that one is making assumptions, and then choosing a strategy for how to deal with the uncertainty?
I believe that for most of the models/narratives the brain is running, this isn’t the case. Suppose that you’re inside a building and want to go out; you don’t (I assume) ever have the thought “my model of reality says that I can’t walk through walls, but maybe that’s wrong and maybe I should test that”. Rather your brain is (in this case correctly) so convinced about walking-through-walls being an impossibility that it never even occurs to you to consider the possibility. Nor is it immediately apparent that walking-through-walls being an impossibility is something that’s implied by a model of the world that you have. It just appears as a fact about the way the world is, assuming that it even occurs to you to consciously think about it at all.
More social kinds of narratives are similar. Ozy talks about this in Greyed Out Options:
You can go outside in pajamas. It isn’t illegal. No one will stop you. Most of the time, no one will even comment. Sure, you might run into someone you know, but in many cities that’s not going to happen, and anyway they’re likely to assume you have a stomach flu or otherwise have some perfectly good reason for running around in pajamas. You’re unlikely to face any negative consequences whatsoever.
But when I’ve suggested this to people, they tend to object not because they have no particular reason to go places in pajamas (pajamas are very comfortable) but because people don’t do that. It’s just not on the list of available options. If you did, you’d probably feel anxious and maybe even ashamed, because it’s genuinely hard to do something that people don’t do.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you should go places wearing pajamas! I don’t. I’m suggesting that you consider thoughtfully which of your options are grayed out and why.
Here are some other grayed-out options I’ve observed among people I’ve met:
Starting a conversation with a stranger.
Asking someone out.
Eating at a restaurant alone.
Walking alone at night (especially if you’re female or were raised female).
Writing a novel or a blog post.
Drawing a picture.
Submitting your writing to a publisher.
Emailing a professor to ask a question about their discipline.
Making a pull request on Github.
Editing Wikipedia.
Writing a computer program to fix a problem you have or automate a piece of work you have to do often.
Starting a recurring event like a bookclub or a meetup.
Throwing a party.
Complaining to customer service.
Opening up a broken machine and poking around in there to see if something obvious is wrong.
Googling your problem.
Negotiating your salary.
Researching a topic of interest on Google Scholar.
Doing parkour on walls etc that you find on your walk.
Planting potato eyes etc and getting food from them.
Talking to a famous person.
Singing in public.
Transitioning.
Dating people of the same gender.
Talking openly with your partner about your relationship needs.
Traveling the world and crashing on various friends’ couches instead of having a house.
Cutting off your family.
Being out about something stigmatized (your disability, your sexual orientation, your religion, your hobbies…).
Asking for your unusual preferences to be accommodated (by service workers or by people you know).
Different people have different grayed-out options, and I think this is actually a really common reason that people behave differently from each other. The reason that I write blog posts and other people don’t is not that I’m good at writing and they’re not; it’s that writing a blog post about something I’m thinking about is on my action menu and it’s not on theirs.
Ozy mentions that these kinds of options may seem unavailable for two reasons. One is that it never occurs to a person that it’d even be possible for them to do such a thing. Or, if the possibility is pointed out to them, it just seems true that they can’t do such a thing, due to a sense of “who does that” or the thought just feeling very overwhelming or something else. (I would add to that list the sense of “I’m not the kind of a person who would/could do that”.)
That’s analogous to the way that the possibility of walking through walls either never occurs to you, or if it does, you’ll (correctly) just feel that it’s just true that walking through walls is impossible, so never worth considering. But whereas we can be very sure that walking through walls really is impossible, there are quite a few things that people’s minds automatically dismiss as impossible even if the options are pointed out to them. Not because they really are impossible, but because the people have such a strong narrative/model of themselves saying it’s impossible, and the certainty their brain has in the model makes the model look like reality.
So I’d say that if you are the point where your brain has tagged something as having sufficient uncertainty that it treats it as an uncertain model, you’re already most of the way there. The vast majority of the narratives anyone has never get tagged as narratives. The predictive processing thing just happens under the hood and the narratives are treated as facts until there’s enough conflicting information that the conflict rises to the level of conscious awareness.
The topic of the conversation is whether or not you can decide to bring things into being explicitly uncertain, not whether or not things are already explicitly uncertain. I’m saying that you can decide to in general have incoming falsifying information in general bring uncertainty into explicitness and falsify incorrect models. This is a counterclaim to the version of the claim
if you have experiences that contradict the lens, they will tend to be dismissed as noise
that implies that you can’t decide not to “view your life through narratives”, which you seem to be saying.
(FWIW I’ve done almost all of the things on that list; the ones I haven’t done mostly don’t apply to me (I mean, I’ve explicitly considered them and didn’t feel like doing them).)
Note that the bit you quoted was about something I said might happen, not that it will inevitably happen. I was describing a possible failure mode that one may fall victim to, but I don’t mean to say that it’s the only possible outcome.
I do think that you can reduce the amount of narratives that you are viewing your life through, but it’s not something that you can just decide to do. Rather it requires an active and ongoing effort of learning to identify what your narratives are, so that you could become sufficiently conscious of them to question them.
More generally, I’d say that a part of what a narrative is something like your model of yourself, that you then use for guiding your decisions (e.g. you think that you like spontaneity, so you avoid doing any organization, since your narrative implies that you wouldn’t like it). It then establishes a lens that you interpret your experience through; if you have experiences that contradict the lens, they will tend to be dismissed as noise as long as the deviations are small enough.
It says that it (the model? the narrative?) will (definitely?) establish a lens that tends to dismiss incoming information. There’s a “tends” there but it’s not across populations, it says anyone with a “model” like this will often dismiss incoming information. I’m saying here that models are really quite separate from narratives, and models don’t dismiss incoming information. Not sure whether you see this point, and whether you agree with it.
You say “might” in the next paragraph:
you might adopt a self-model of “the kind of a person who doesn’t have narratives” and interpret all of your experiences through that lens
I’m saying that this is imprecise in an important and confusing way: a thing that you’re “adopting” in this sense, can’t be just a model (e.g. a self-model).
Rather it requires an active and ongoing effort of learning to identify what your narratives are, so that you could become sufficiently conscious of them to question them.
So, it’s clear that if your behavior is governed by stories, then in order for your behavior to end up not governed by stories you’d have to go through a process like this. I think that it makes sense for the OP to say that viewing their life through narratives is a mistake; do you agree with that? The word “ongoing” in your statement seems to imply that one’s behavior must be somewhat governed by stories; is that what you think? If so, why do you think that?
Ah sorry, you’re right; the “might” did indeed come later.
I’m saying here that models are really quite separate from narratives, and models don’t dismiss incoming information. Not sure whether you see this point, and whether you agree with it.
Maybe? I do agree that we might use the word “model” for things that don’t necessarily involve narratives or dismissing information; e.g. if I use information gathered from opinion polls to model the results of the upcoming election, then that doesn’t have a particular tendency to dismiss information.
In the context of this discussion, though, I have been talking about “models” in the sense of “the kinds of models that the human brain runs on and which I’m assuming to work something like the human brain is described to work according to predictive processing (and thus having a tendency to sometimes dismiss information)”. And the thing that I’m calling “narratives” form a very significant subset of those.
I think that it makes sense for the OP to say that viewing their life through narratives is a mistake; do you agree with that? The word “ongoing” in your statement seems to imply that one’s behavior must be somewhat governed by stories; is that what you think? If so, why do you think that?
I do think that one’s behavior must be somewhat governed by narratives, since I think of narratives as being models, and you need models to base your behavior on. E.g. the person I quoted originally had “I am a disorganized person” as their narrative; then they switched to “I am an organized person” narrative, which produced better results due to being more accurate. What they didn’t do was to stop having any story about their degree of organization in the first place. (These are narratives in the same sense that something being a blegg or a rube is a narrative; whether something is a blegg or a rube is a mind-produced intuition that we mistakenly take as a reflection of how Something Really Is.)
Even something like “I have a self that survives over time” seems to be a story, and one which humans are pretty strongly hardwired to believe in (on the level of some behaviors, if not explicit beliefs). You can come to see through it more and more through something like advanced meditation, but seeing through it entirely seems to be a sufficiently massive undertaking that I’m not clear if it’s practically feasible for most people.
Probably the main reason for why I think this is the experience of having done a fair amount of meditation and therapy and those leading me to notice an increasing amount of things about myself or the world that seemed just like facts, that were actually stories/models. (Some of the stories are accurate, but they’re still stories.) And this seems to both make theoretical sense in light of what I know about the human brain, and the nature of intelligence in general. And it also matches the experiences of other people who have investigated their experience using these kinds of methods.
In this light, “viewing your life through narratives is a mistake” seems something like a category error. A mistake is something that you do, that you could have elected not to do if you’d known better. But if narratives are something that your brain just does by default, it’s not exactly a mistake you’ve made.
That said, one could argue that it’s very valuable to learn to see all the ways in which you really do view your life through narratives, so that you could better question them. And one could say that it’s a mistake not to invest effort in that. I’d be inclined to agree with that form of the claim.
Ok thanks for clarifying. Maybe this thread is quiescable? I’ll respond, but not in a way that adds much, more like just trying to summarize. (I mean feel free to respond; just to say, I’ve gotten my local question answered re/ your beliefs.) In summary, we have a disagreement about what is possible; whether it’s possible to not be a predictive processor. My experience is that I can increase (by detailed effort in various contexts) my general (generalizable to contexts I haven’t specifically made the effort for) tendency to not dismiss incoming information, not require delusion in order to have goals and plans, not behave in a way governed by stories.
if narratives are something that your brain just does by default
Predictive processing may or may not be a good description of low-level brain function, but that doesn’t imply what’s a good idea for us to be and doesn’t imply what we have to be, where what we are is the high-level functioning, the mind / consciousness / agency. Low-level predictive processors are presumably Turing complete and so can be used as substrate for (genuine, updateful, non-action-forcing) models and (genuine, non-delusion-requiring) plans/goals. To the extent we are or can look like that, I do not want to describe us as being relevantly made of predictive processors, like how you can appropriately understand computers as being “at a higher level” than transistors, and how it would be unhelpful to say “computers are fundamentally just transistors”. Like, yes, your computer has a bunch of transistors in it and you have to think about transistors to do some computing tasks and to make modern computers, but, that’s not necessary, and more importantly thinking about transistors is so far from sufficient to understand computation that it’s nearly irrelevant.
one could argue that it’s very valuable to learn to see all the ways in which you really do view your life through narratives, so that you could better question them. And one could say that it’s a mistake not to invest effort in that. I’d be inclined to agree with that form of the claim.
For predictive processors, questioning something is tantamount to somewhat deciding against behaving some way. So it’s not just a question of questioning narratives within the predictive processing architecture (in the sense of comparing/modifying/refactoring/deleting/adopting narratives), it’s also a question of decoupling questioning predictions from changing plans.
I’m not sure what you mean by decoupling one’s modeling from one’s decisions, can you elaborate?
I mean disposing yourself so that incoming information is updated on. To avoid thrashing, you need some way of smoothing things out; some way to make it so that you don’t keep switching contexts (on all scales), and so that switching contexts isn’t so costly. The predictive processing way is to ignore information insofar as you can get away with it. The straw Bayesian way is to just never do anything because it might be the wrong plan and you should think about whether it’s wrong before you do anything. These options are fundamentally flawed and aren’t the only two options, e.g. you can explicitly try to execute your plans in a way that makes it useful to have done the first half of the plan without doing the second (e.g. building skills, gaining general understanding, doing the math, etc.); and e.g. you can make explicit your cruxes for whether this plan is worthwhile so that you can jump on opportunities to get future cruxy information.
I think you are assuming that one is consciously aware of the fact that one is making assumptions, and then choosing a strategy for how to deal with the uncertainty?
I believe that for most of the models/narratives the brain is running, this isn’t the case. Suppose that you’re inside a building and want to go out; you don’t (I assume) ever have the thought “my model of reality says that I can’t walk through walls, but maybe that’s wrong and maybe I should test that”. Rather your brain is (in this case correctly) so convinced about walking-through-walls being an impossibility that it never even occurs to you to consider the possibility. Nor is it immediately apparent that walking-through-walls being an impossibility is something that’s implied by a model of the world that you have. It just appears as a fact about the way the world is, assuming that it even occurs to you to consciously think about it at all.
More social kinds of narratives are similar. Ozy talks about this in Greyed Out Options:
Ozy mentions that these kinds of options may seem unavailable for two reasons. One is that it never occurs to a person that it’d even be possible for them to do such a thing. Or, if the possibility is pointed out to them, it just seems true that they can’t do such a thing, due to a sense of “who does that” or the thought just feeling very overwhelming or something else. (I would add to that list the sense of “I’m not the kind of a person who would/could do that”.)
That’s analogous to the way that the possibility of walking through walls either never occurs to you, or if it does, you’ll (correctly) just feel that it’s just true that walking through walls is impossible, so never worth considering. But whereas we can be very sure that walking through walls really is impossible, there are quite a few things that people’s minds automatically dismiss as impossible even if the options are pointed out to them. Not because they really are impossible, but because the people have such a strong narrative/model of themselves saying it’s impossible, and the certainty their brain has in the model makes the model look like reality.
So I’d say that if you are the point where your brain has tagged something as having sufficient uncertainty that it treats it as an uncertain model, you’re already most of the way there. The vast majority of the narratives anyone has never get tagged as narratives. The predictive processing thing just happens under the hood and the narratives are treated as facts until there’s enough conflicting information that the conflict rises to the level of conscious awareness.
The topic of the conversation is whether or not you can decide to bring things into being explicitly uncertain, not whether or not things are already explicitly uncertain. I’m saying that you can decide to in general have incoming falsifying information in general bring uncertainty into explicitness and falsify incorrect models. This is a counterclaim to the version of the claim
that implies that you can’t decide not to “view your life through narratives”, which you seem to be saying.
(FWIW I’ve done almost all of the things on that list; the ones I haven’t done mostly don’t apply to me (I mean, I’ve explicitly considered them and didn’t feel like doing them).)
Note that the bit you quoted was about something I said might happen, not that it will inevitably happen. I was describing a possible failure mode that one may fall victim to, but I don’t mean to say that it’s the only possible outcome.
I do think that you can reduce the amount of narratives that you are viewing your life through, but it’s not something that you can just decide to do. Rather it requires an active and ongoing effort of learning to identify what your narratives are, so that you could become sufficiently conscious of them to question them.
I don’t see a “might” in this paragraph:
It says that it (the model? the narrative?) will (definitely?) establish a lens that tends to dismiss incoming information. There’s a “tends” there but it’s not across populations, it says anyone with a “model” like this will often dismiss incoming information. I’m saying here that models are really quite separate from narratives, and models don’t dismiss incoming information. Not sure whether you see this point, and whether you agree with it.
You say “might” in the next paragraph:
I’m saying that this is imprecise in an important and confusing way: a thing that you’re “adopting” in this sense, can’t be just a model (e.g. a self-model).
So, it’s clear that if your behavior is governed by stories, then in order for your behavior to end up not governed by stories you’d have to go through a process like this. I think that it makes sense for the OP to say that viewing their life through narratives is a mistake; do you agree with that? The word “ongoing” in your statement seems to imply that one’s behavior must be somewhat governed by stories; is that what you think? If so, why do you think that?
Ah sorry, you’re right; the “might” did indeed come later.
Maybe? I do agree that we might use the word “model” for things that don’t necessarily involve narratives or dismissing information; e.g. if I use information gathered from opinion polls to model the results of the upcoming election, then that doesn’t have a particular tendency to dismiss information.
In the context of this discussion, though, I have been talking about “models” in the sense of “the kinds of models that the human brain runs on and which I’m assuming to work something like the human brain is described to work according to predictive processing (and thus having a tendency to sometimes dismiss information)”. And the thing that I’m calling “narratives” form a very significant subset of those.
I do think that one’s behavior must be somewhat governed by narratives, since I think of narratives as being models, and you need models to base your behavior on. E.g. the person I quoted originally had “I am a disorganized person” as their narrative; then they switched to “I am an organized person” narrative, which produced better results due to being more accurate. What they didn’t do was to stop having any story about their degree of organization in the first place. (These are narratives in the same sense that something being a blegg or a rube is a narrative; whether something is a blegg or a rube is a mind-produced intuition that we mistakenly take as a reflection of how Something Really Is.)
Even something like “I have a self that survives over time” seems to be a story, and one which humans are pretty strongly hardwired to believe in (on the level of some behaviors, if not explicit beliefs). You can come to see through it more and more through something like advanced meditation, but seeing through it entirely seems to be a sufficiently massive undertaking that I’m not clear if it’s practically feasible for most people.
Probably the main reason for why I think this is the experience of having done a fair amount of meditation and therapy and those leading me to notice an increasing amount of things about myself or the world that seemed just like facts, that were actually stories/models. (Some of the stories are accurate, but they’re still stories.) And this seems to both make theoretical sense in light of what I know about the human brain, and the nature of intelligence in general. And it also matches the experiences of other people who have investigated their experience using these kinds of methods.
In this light, “viewing your life through narratives is a mistake” seems something like a category error. A mistake is something that you do, that you could have elected not to do if you’d known better. But if narratives are something that your brain just does by default, it’s not exactly a mistake you’ve made.
That said, one could argue that it’s very valuable to learn to see all the ways in which you really do view your life through narratives, so that you could better question them. And one could say that it’s a mistake not to invest effort in that. I’d be inclined to agree with that form of the claim.
Ok thanks for clarifying. Maybe this thread is quiescable? I’ll respond, but not in a way that adds much, more like just trying to summarize. (I mean feel free to respond; just to say, I’ve gotten my local question answered re/ your beliefs.) In summary, we have a disagreement about what is possible; whether it’s possible to not be a predictive processor. My experience is that I can increase (by detailed effort in various contexts) my general (generalizable to contexts I haven’t specifically made the effort for) tendency to not dismiss incoming information, not require delusion in order to have goals and plans, not behave in a way governed by stories.
Predictive processing may or may not be a good description of low-level brain function, but that doesn’t imply what’s a good idea for us to be and doesn’t imply what we have to be, where what we are is the high-level functioning, the mind / consciousness / agency. Low-level predictive processors are presumably Turing complete and so can be used as substrate for (genuine, updateful, non-action-forcing) models and (genuine, non-delusion-requiring) plans/goals. To the extent we are or can look like that, I do not want to describe us as being relevantly made of predictive processors, like how you can appropriately understand computers as being “at a higher level” than transistors, and how it would be unhelpful to say “computers are fundamentally just transistors”. Like, yes, your computer has a bunch of transistors in it and you have to think about transistors to do some computing tasks and to make modern computers, but, that’s not necessary, and more importantly thinking about transistors is so far from sufficient to understand computation that it’s nearly irrelevant.
For predictive processors, questioning something is tantamount to somewhat deciding against behaving some way. So it’s not just a question of questioning narratives within the predictive processing architecture (in the sense of comparing/modifying/refactoring/deleting/adopting narratives), it’s also a question of decoupling questioning predictions from changing plans.