Locating My Eyes (Part 3 of "The Sense of Physical Necessity")

This is the third post in a sequence that demonstrates a complete naturalist study, specifically a study of query hugging (sort of), as described in The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism. This one demos phases one and two: Locating Fulcrum Experiences and Getting Your Eyes On. For context on this sequence, see the intro post. If you’re intimidated by the length of this post, remember that this is meant as reference material. Feel free to start with “My Goals For This Post”, and consider what more you want from there.

Having chosen a quest—”What’s going on with distraction?”—my naturalist study began in earnest.

In “Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism”, the first two phases of study that I discussed after “Getting Started” were “Locating Fulcrum Experiences” and “Getting Your Eyes On”. In practice, though, I often do a combination of these phases, which is what happened this time. For the sake of keeping track of where we are in the progression, I think it’s best to think of me as hanging out in some blend of the early phases, which we might as well call “Locating Your Eyes”.

My Goals For This Post

Much of the “learning” that happens in the first two phases (or “locating your eyes”) could be just as well described as unlearning: a setting aside of potentially obfuscatory preconceptions. My unlearning this time was especially arduous. I was guided by a clumsy story, and had to persist through a long period of deeply uncomfortable doubt and confusion as I gradually weaned myself off of it.

It took me a long time to find the right topic and to figure out a good way into it. If this were a slightly different sort of essay, I’d skip all of the messiness and jump to the part where my progress was relatively clear and linear. I would leave my fumbling clumsiness off of the page.

Instead, I want to show you what actually happened. I want you to know what it is like when I am “feeling around in the dark” toward the beginning of a study. I want to show you the reality of looking for a fulcrum experience when you haven’t already decided what you’re looking for. Because in truth, it can be quite difficult and discouraging, even when you’re pretty good at this stuff; it’s important to be prepared for that.

So I want you to see me struggle, to see how I wrestle with challenges. In the rest of this post, I hope to highlight the moves that allowed me to successfully progress, pointing out what I responded to in those moments, what actions I took in response, and what resulted.

To summarize my account: I looped through the first two phases of naturalism a few times, studying “distraction”, then “concentration”, then “crucialness”, before giving up in despair. Then I un-gave-up, looped through them once more with “closeness to the issue”, and finally settled on the right experience to study: a sensation that I call “chest luster”.

To understand this account as a demonstration of naturalism, it’s important to recognize that every loop was a success, even before I found the right place to focus. When studying distraction and concentration, I was not really learning to hug the query yet; but I was learning to perceive details of my experience in the preconceptual layer beneath concepts related to attention. Laying that foundation for direct contact was valuable, since “hug the query” is a special way of using attention.

I will therefore tell you about each loop. I recommend reading through the first loop (“Distraction”) even if you’re skipping around, since it includes some pretty important updates to my understanding of the naturalist procedure.

Distraction

I realized during this study that there are a couple crucial distinctions related to fulcrum experiences that I failed to make clearly in the Nuts and Bolts sequence. They’re important to understanding why I proceeded as I did, so here’s a note about them. (This one is less skippable than the others.)

Imagine you want to study newts, and you know that they gather to breed in a certain pool for a few days each spring. You have the pool marked on your map as “breeding pool”, so you know that to study the newts, you should navigate to the breeding pool.

Neither the spot marked “breeding pool” on your map, nor the breeding pool itself, is the creature you want to study. What you’re after are experiences of newts. The map is a tool for finding the pool, and the pool is the physical location of the newts.

Now imagine a slightly different scenario: Through your ecological studies, you’ve inferred that there must be some sort of predator occupying a certain niche; the seasonal fluctuations in the local population of worms and mollusks doesn’t make sense without it. You want to study whatever’s causing the fluctuations.

You do not know that you’re looking for “newts”. In fact, you’ve never even heard of a newt. All you know is that there’s something going on with the worm and mollusk populations, and some sort of amphibian predator is probably responsible.

Again, the experiences you need to have if you want to really learn something are experiences of newts. But given that you don’t even have a concept of newts, your best bet for running into those experiences is to wade into a likely breeding pool, and then to just start looking around for anything that might enjoy eating worms and mollusks.

The fulcrum experience here is probably something like the spotted pattern on a newt’s skin; those spots are among the ways that Eastern spotted newts impinge upon human perceptions.

The fulcrum experience is not “breeding pool”, because that is a label on a map, not a way that something impinges on human perception. Nor is the fulcrum experience “the wetness of water on my legs”, because that is how water impinges on human perception, not how newts do.

However, “the wetness of water on my legs” is an intermediate step between the concept of a breeding pool and the fulcrum experience of spots; a step which I have not named before now, so unfortunately I think I need to invent some new terminology.

The visual perception of a spotted pattern: “fulcrum experience” (A collection of sensations that would lead you to relate differently to your topic if you observed it closely.)
The wetness of water on your legs: “correlated experience” (A collection of sensations that may indicate a fulcrum experience is nearby.)
The idea of a breeding pool: “conceptual pointer” (A feature of your map that suggests when to pay attention during your search for fulcrum experiences; these more often reveal correlated experiences than fulcrum experiences.)

I worry that this all sounds a bit tedious, but this framework is probably as close as I’ve so far come to explaining how exactly naturalism manages to repair broken concepts from the bottom up. If your concepts are broken, then your conceptual pointer will almost certainly not lead you directly to a fulcrum experience. But if you can get the hang of identifying crucial conceptual pointers, then it may lead you to a correlated experience, some set of sensations that is frequently present when a novel observation is in principle available to you. Once you’re in the right place and becoming sensitive to experiences, rather than merely employing concepts, there is hope.

Ok, now let’s match up the pieces of that analogy with the strategy in my own study.

I articulated a story during Catching the Spark that “I leave behind distraction when I look toward what is crucial.” The concept of “distraction” that I employ in that sentence is a conceptual pointer, like a dot on the map labeled “breeding pool” in the analogy above. It is not an experience of distraction itself (just as the dot on the map is not full of water).^[1]

What the conceptual pointer points toward is experiences of distraction, which may or may not be correlated with some kind of fulcrum experience for this study.

Even if I had correctly identified a closely correlated experience when I chose to focus on “distraction”, experiencing distraction would be like experiencing the wetness of water on your legs while wading into a breeding pool. Wet legs is a sign you’re in the right place, but the fulcrum experience itself will turn out to be the spotted pattern of a newt’s skin.

What would my fulcrum experience be? I did not know yet. I only suspected that I might be able to find it somewhere around experiences of distraction.

And so I studied distraction, asking myself, “Where would I go to find an experience of distraction?”

I thought that I might find distraction during goal-directed behaviors: attempts to accomplish things or to solve problems. So I tried solving a problem from Thinking Physics, specifically “Steam Locomotive”.

This is where the field version of “locating fulcra” began to blend with “getting your eyes on”. I was trying to get my eyes on about distraction, even though distraction indicates a possible location of fulcrum experiences, rather than a fulcrum experience itself.

Why do this? Because I needed reference experiences so that I could narrow in on a fulcrum experience.

(Reminder: A reference experience is a situation you can walk through in your mind, and use as reference material for making guesses. I introduced this term under “Guessing Which Observations Will Matter” in “Locating Fulcrum Experiences.”)

In the offline version of fulcrum location, you consult memory and imagination, hoping to retrieve previously-stored information that will help you find a fulcrum experience. If I’d done this offline, I might have called to mind a memory of being distracted, and asked myself, “What exactly was that like? And what parts of that experience seem particularly relevant to this query-hugging thing I’m interested in?”

Instead, I taught myself to pay attention to distraction, so that I could watch for anything that might be relevant as distraction was happening.

Often, doing this online is more efficient than doing it offline, even though it’s a little tricky to describe, and can take a while to get the hang of. If I did find something relevant in the middle of an experience of distraction—similar to seeing something spotted and slithery while first wading into the newt pool—I’d immediately be able to pivot my attention, and I might collect a lot of detail on a fulcrum experience right away.

So I tried to solve “Steam Locomotive”, and I watched for times when I might be “distracted”.

I found that it was not at all obvious most of the time whether I was or was not distracted. This is a common finding in a naturalist study. Concepts tend to abstract the properties of paradigmatic examples of things, but paradigmatic examples are pretty rare in concrete experience. “World is crazier and more of it than we think,” as MacNeice put it.

An excerpt from my log^[2] (skip to avoid mild Thinking Physics spoilers):

I have a feeling that the crucial information somehow comes from the size and/or number of the driving wheels, but I seem to be sort of avoiding the wheels. Not exactly avoiding them, but circling around them. Circumnavigating them. Why am I circumnavigating the thing I expect to be crucial, rather than sending my attention directly to the wheels? Am I “getting distracted” by how locomotives work in general?

I learned from this exercise that “avoiding” and “circumnavigating” are things attention can do that is different from “obviously not being distracted”.

Thinking Physics is a great lab setup for this sort of thing, but I was learning in the field as well.

Over the following few days, I collected several field notes. Most of them involve looking at an experience and going, “Is this distraction?” or “What is up with this?”

For example:

I finished a Scott article [the one on automaticity], then clicked a tab with a youtube vid I have open. I felt discomfort of conflict; watching a vid at night is unwholesome or something, and this is a better time for doing daily review. But I was sort of trying to run away or hide from those thoughts, and I had an impulse to click play before they could find me! There’s something I’m “supposed” to do, but the vid is somehow easier/nicer. This seems more like “procrastination” than “distraction”. What’s the difference?
While my thoughts were “drifty”, I began a chocolate tasting, and I popped a piece in my mouth before I even sniffed it. I forgot to smell the chocolate first. What does “forgetting” have to do with distraction?
I’m lifting weights and also listening to a podcast. What’s the difference between being distracted and multitasking?

This may look like I was mainly trying to improve my map around “distraction”. In a sense I was; but that activity was only instrumental. I was really trying to get in more direct contact with the underlying territory. The explicit map was not the point^[3]. The point was the experiences, and my ability to be reflectively aware of their details.

It’s like I’d used my map to navigate to roughly the area of the newt pool, but it was dark out and I couldn’t see very well, and also it turned out that there wasn’t so much a pond as an especially swampy depression in the forest floor. So I was feeling around and going, “Is this the pool? Perhaps it’s a random puddle? What about this soaked bit of moss? What about this wet rock?” and I was updating my map as I went. I didn’t really care whether a given experience “counts as distraction”. I was just trying to get in touch with whatever was going on in the territory in the general vicinity of distraction.

I continued to observe distraction in this way for about two weeks, at which point I felt it was time for my first analysis session. I looked through all the lab notes and field notes I’d collected so far, held them up against my most recent story statement, and asked myself what comes next.

In response to my observations, I articulated a revised story of distraction. Here’s what I wrote.

My naive conception of distraction was a little silly. I don’t think I believed my naive conception upon even a moment of deliberate reflection, but now I’m in much better contact with what’s really going on.
I think that naively, I imagined that there are “distractions”, such that distraction inheres in external objects. That’s not the core of my previous confusion, though. The core is something about the unitariness of the concept, I think. As though distraction isn’t made of parts, as though it’s a simple state of mind rather than a description of a situation.
Here are the parts I currently think distraction is made of:
1) Intention. Perhaps something more specific than this, such as intention to do something in particular with attention. I’m not quite clear on this part, and I think I’ll spend a little time studying “concentration” to become clearer on it.
2) Reflective awareness of [intention?]. If you “forget what you were doing”, you’ve at least somewhat “gotten distracted” even if you’re actually continuing to perform the intended actions. (I’m not quite sure what’s up with this either, but empirically it seems to be a theme.)
3) Attention that is substantially focused. (It is not “lack of focus” that makes distraction, but rather focus on a different thing than “intended”. I think “diffuse focus” is something else.)
There’s a substantial privileging of perspective in “distraction”. When I “intend” to focus on cooking, and I “get distracted” by a crying baby such that I focus on the baby instead of on cooking, it certainly seems to me that there is some sense in which I also “intended” to focus on the baby. It’s only from the perspective of whatever made the cooking intention that I’m focusing on something other than what I intended to focus on.
I think there are a variety of interesting things that cause attention to move away from one object and toward another. I strongly suspect that this point will turn out to have crucial implications for mastering “Hug the Query”.

(It did.)

As a result of these reflections, I decided to move my investigation away from “distraction” and toward “concentration”, which I hoped would give me another perspective on “distraction” by highlighting the negative space.

Let’s pause to review this loop through the early phases of study. What was it? What happened during it, and why?

Because it was a load-bearing piece of my story (“I leave behind distraction when I look toward what is crucial,”) I treated “distraction” as a conceptual pointer, an idea that could lead me to concrete experiences that might coincide with something important.

I had ideas about what “distraction” was, and these ideas helped me encounter concrete experiences of distraction. I looked for those experiences in a session of lab work, where I tried to solve a problem from Thinking Physics, suspecting that distraction might show up during problem solving. I also watched for experiences of distraction as I went about my days, constantly “tilting my head” or boggling at distraction (in CFAR parlance), and I found myself revising my understanding of what distraction is and how it works.

After I’d collected notes and observations for a while, I did an analysis session to figure out what I should do next. Reviewing my notes, I realized that I wanted to see distraction from another angle, specifically to examine the negative space around it. Toward that end, I chose to begin studying “concentration”.

Concentration

In retrospect, I think my decision to study “concentration” was overly mechanical. One of my heuristics is, “When you feel a little lost, sometimes it helps to try studying the opposite thing,” and that’s what happened here.

Ideally, decisions drawn from reorientation sessions “come from my core”—from an integrated sense of purpose and quality; from vision. What I actually did was more like reaching into the grab bag of mathematical tools during a math exam in high school and “applying the quadratic formula” because you know how to do that, even if you lack any particular sense that it will help.

This decision to study “concentration” came not so much from vision, as from a feeling of pressure to do something legible because I was being watched (by you, through this essay). I made it with a sort of flailing motion. This was inefficient, but it didn’t break anything in the end.

Much as with “distraction”, I used “concentration” as a conceptual pointer. I set out to sink my attention into the details of experiences related to my concept of concentration, using both lab work and field work.

In my first session of lab work, I wanted to really isolate the experience of concentration, to capture it on a slide beneath a microscope. I wanted to know, “What does concentration feel like, all on its own? When I try to concentrate, what motions do I make, and what results?” So I tried a kind of mental exercise that was new to me, one that (as I understand it) consists of basically nothing but concentration: candle gazing. I set out to “concentrate” for one hour on the flame of a candle.

To my surprise, it turned out that my eyes did not leave the candle flame for the entire hour. But of course, there is more to concentration than physically staring.

One thing I found is that concentration seems to exist by degrees. I can concentrate better or worse, but while there might be some threshold beyond which I would describe myself as “concentrating”, that point seems pretty arbitrary.

What was it for a strategy to “work”? What was my perception of “successful concentration” made of?

I’d describe it as the size and frequency of fluctuations in the direction of my attention. If something “new” was in the spotlight—a fragment of song, the motion of my shoulder, etc.—then my attention had moved, and I perceived myself to be concentrating “les” than otherwise. The purpose of the candle flame (I discovered) was to provide a point of comparison. I started out focused on the candle, and I returned my attention to the candle at every opportunity, so I knew that if whatever was in my attention was not the candle, something had changed—my concentration had lapsed.

I also found that several tactics occurred to me, on the spur of the moment, when I wanted to “concentrate better”. Among the apparently less effective methods was brute force: exerting a top-down pressure to banish non-candle mental motions. Even when I was successful, it felt like holding a beach ball underwater.

An enjoyable but fairly ineffective method was to imagine sending my thoughts toward the flame to be burned up by it. I spontaneously “felt” this process pretty vividly, in a tactile sort of way, but my attention didn’t seem to stabilize much afterward.

Although I didn’t have great control over it, the most effective deliberate strategy seemed to be variations on “relaxing into the flame”. Relaxing my mind in an opening way caused a lot of drifting, but pouring myself like a liquid toward the single point of the flame worked pretty well.

What resulted from an extended period of pure concentration? One thing that resulted was a pretty intense aversion to attempting to write about it! There was a kind of inertia, and I did not want to move my mind around to find words and record observations. I’m glad I wrote about it anyway, because forming long-term memories is apparently incompatible with candle gazing, since any kind of memory encoding process is not the candle flame.

But also, I do think I became much more familiar with the phenomenology of concentration, which would be quite useful to me should concentration turn out to be important to my study.

The next day, I attempted the very same exercise, this time using a math textbook instead of a candle flame. I’d now be concentrating “in practice”, so to speak; for a purpose, rather than in isolation.

The book I used was Terence Tao’s Real Analysis I. I wasn’t quite sure what “concentrating on the book” would really turn out to entail; but my framework for the physical activity was to set a timer, open the book, point my eyes at the pages, and “do nothing else” until the timer went off, just like with the candle.

There were a few moments I thought might be “lapses in concentration”. At one point I heard someone calling, but concluded they were not talking to me and turned back to the book. A few times I “failed to process” the words I’d just read, for various reasons. And at one point I decided to skip half a chapter; I couldn’t quite work out the relationship between this decision and concentration.

What was my experience of “successful concentration” like, in the context of reading the textbook?

Unlike with the candle, I spent more time “successfully concentrating” than not, but much of it had a “forced” quality: I had to do something active that often felt a bit like shoving my mind through a straw.

It was also a lot like aiming an arrow. In my notes, I wrote

‘Concentration’ is really an excellent term for it: the gathering of many cognitive resources to a single point. But a moving point! If an arrow had to be continuously aimed the whole time it was flying, it would be like reading about real analysis.

On the third day, I intended to merely repeat the previous exercise, “reading the textbook. There was a lot more textbook to read, after all. I figured I might as well gather some more data.

However, I was dissatisfied right at the start by a certain definition as presented. I instead spent the whole hour attempting to make a definition I preferred. This involved sketching a logical framework and then trying to express some things formally.

This time, I think my log describes a paradigmatic instance of flow. An excerpt:

My two previous rounds of lab work on concentration involved some kind of ‘trying’ for much of the time. This… I don’t know, I was ‘trying’ to solve a problem, but my devotion of effort felt like inevitability. It would have been hard to stop myself from trying. It was hard to stop myself [when it was time to end the exercise]. It was like being a flood.

I was surprised by the variety of experiences that my idea of “concentration” pointed me toward. Sometimes it was easy, and sometimes it was hard. Sometimes it hurt, and sometimes it felt wonderful. Sometimes it was hard to start, and sometimes it was hard to stop. The nature of the object of my focus seemed to matter a lot.

All of this was interesting to me, but I couldn’t tell whether any of it mattered.

My focus on “concentration” only lasted a few days. It did not feel on track to me, and in fact I was starting to feel pretty lost and sort of scared about it. In such situations, I often do a reorientation session, even if little time has passed. That’s what I did here.

I want to think more about my “hug the query” study. It’s not on track yet. Or, it hasn’t hit its stride.
Probably the hardest thing about a study that begins with someone else’s idea, whether gleaned in text, video, or conversation, is breathing your own life into it. There’s usually a major obstacle at the beginning where you’re starting with husks, symbols, abstract concepts optimized for communication with other people rather than for communion with the world. In such a situation, it’s essential to prioritize contact with the territory over everything else. Even if the part of the territory you contact has nothing to do with the intended topic, an experience of direct contact is preferable to the dutiful performance of due diligence.
So far in this study, I do not feel I’ve made contact with the right parts of the territory. And I’ve lately found that a little distressing, because I feel eyes on me, and a pressure to get on with it and start making legible progress.
However, if I imagine that distraction and concentration were my main targets, I’d give myself an excellent grade on my work so far. Why? Not because of any particular thing I’ve learned, but because I feel that I’m in much better contact with those things now. They are alive and present for me, if not at this moment then at my whim. I have observed them directly, and if at any time I choose to do so again, I will succeed.
Which means that this study is mine. I’m not focused on quite the right things yet, but what I’m doing is real.
When I look over the current version of my story, “I leave distraction behind when I look toward what is crucial,” here’s what I see: The first part is off somehow, and the second part seems important but still mysterious to me. During the time I spent on the practice of real analysis, I think that I left distraction as far behind as it is possible to leave it. I have not had a less distracted hour in the past five years, as far as I can recall. And although something in that experience may be involved in “hug the query”, it didn’t strike me as quite what I’d like to study.
…
When I listen now for an enlivening voice, for something on the lookout for glimmers of quality, I’m drawn toward “what is crucial”. There is an almost intimidating magnitude behind the concept. Or underneath it. It’s as though I’ve so far been playing a little game, in a walled garden with well-tended paths, and with “crucial” I turn my gaze toward the vast wilderness beyond the walls. This is “the tome falling open” that I’ve written about before^[4]. This is what it’s like to recognize something as truly worthy of deep study.
I think it will take me far beyond “hug the query”. But I think it’s the right thing to do.
So this, then, is my quest, as I currently conceive of it: “What is it for something to be crucial?”

I was in a fair bit of conflict with myself over this decision, a conflict I was only gradually learning to see.

Part of me wanted to focus narrowly on investigative avenues informed by my pre-existing understanding of “hug the query”; let’s call that the “Keep It Simple, Stupid” faction. The KISS faction said things like, “It’s really not that complicated. This is an easy skill. Just list some questions and practice hugging them. You’ll be done in no time, and then you can publish something short and straightforward whose value people will easily recognize.” It also said, “You’re going to look really silly for not just doing the simple obvious things.”

I think KISS was basically correct in its claims. The skill Eliezer advocates in “Hug the Query” is pretty simple. It is roughly, “When evaluating evidence, do not ignore the fact that once you account for the cause of a correlation, the observed variables no longer provide information about each other.”

Even back then, I would probably have been capable of designing exercises that target application of this concept in decision making. That is exactly the sort of thing CFAR units are made of, and it is absolutely a worthwhile type of activity.

However, I could feel the desperation for closure underneath these arguments. I wanted to be done hanging out in all of this uncomfortable uncertainty. I wanted to make sense of things, once and for all. To have answers, especially answers I could cleanly communicate to others.

With respect to the intuitions and curiosities that had led me to investigate “hug the query” in the first place, there was no end in sight, and I felt there might never be. It would be easier, it would be vastly more comfortable, to answer a smaller question than the one I actually cared about.

I knew better than to trust motivations of that flavor, at least in the middle of a naturalist study. And so I continued trying to follow the felt senses that had drawn me to Hug the Query”, the ones I tried to articulate in the story, “I leave behind distraction when I look toward what is crucial.” And I began to study “crucial”.

Crucial

In my third loop through Locating Fulcrum experiences and Getting Your Eyes On, my conceptual pointer was “crucial”, as used in the story, “I leave behind distraction when I look toward what is crucial.”

This time, I sought a reference experience by consulting the present moment.

What in my current experience is most like the yearning in my lower chest and throat [which is what I got when I felt into “crucial”]? What does it most harmonize with?
The real analysis textbook behind me. … What reminds me of “Crucial” in this?
Nothing about how it looks, or its physical form. [I opened the book, and reread some of what I’d read before.] “The basic problem is that you have used the natural numbers for so long that they are embedded deeply into your mathematical thinking, and you can make various implicit assumptions about these numbers (e.g., that a+b is always equal to b+a) without even being aware that you are doing so; it is difficult to let go and try to inspect this number system as if it is the first time you have seen it.” It’s the possible significance of this book for me, what it represents.
It speaks my language, and it seems to speak to me. It says, “You do have wings, and I will show you how to use them.” It says, “There is a way forward, and you do not have to be resigned. You are not locked out of mathematical thought forever. You belong here. Break down the walls and build something new from the wreckage.”
How can I tell that it’s “crucial”? There’s a feeling that everything could change, that everything turns on this text, that it’s time to wake up and pay attention and not let this slip through the cracks. Something matters here.
…
What does “things turn on this” feel like? There’s some fear, like standing at the edge of a cliff with a hang glider. An image of something unmoving at the center of chaos, like the eye of a storm. Something about genuine uncertainty, about yes requiring the possibility of no; things don’t turn on what’s already known, perhaps.
I think I have enough to begin getting my eyes on. This textbook turned out to afford a snapshot. Let’s see what else I can find in the next few days.

Reflecting on this excerpt from the other end of my study, I recognize this as a key moment. The fulcrum experience I would eventually focus on is present here, especially in the perception of “things turn on this”. There’s an intersection between “things that are hooked up to the gears of the world” and “things that I actually care about”; membership in that intersection is what I perceived when I glanced at the book, and “things turn on this” was my way of describing it at the time.

In this scenario, “crucial” is the conceptual pointer, and my whole answer to what “things turn on this” feels like is the correlated experience.

Back then, I didn’t know enough to see how important this moment was. I was still swamped with the dizzy disorientation and doubt that had been building for weeks. I was on the right track, but it still felt a lot like a shot in the dark.

So I watched for more instances of this experience, though in a sort of half-hearted way, as I continued to feel pretty lost. Nevertheless, in what field notes resulted, it’s now clear to me that I was honing in on the heart of my study.

Here is a note from September 12th (I had continued to learn real analysis):

I called “≠” “the central operator in the theorem” [while reflecting on my proof that 4 does not equal 0]. What was going on there is something like, “Even if my proof is five hundred lines long, this one symbol on this one line is the point of all of it. Understanding whether and why this symbol may be lawfully written on the final line between a 4 and a 0 is the intention behind all of it. If I prove something else and forget about “≠”, nothing I did mattered with respect to my original intention.”

There’s little phenomenology captured in that note—no more clues about how something important may be impinging on my perception—but it is a member of the intersection I talked about before. The proof “turns” on “does not equal”.

I was also beginning, at this point, to pay closer attention to the kinds of phenomena that can be fulcrum experiences—the immediate sensations that are more basic than situations or concepts—and so I was moving closer to “getting your eyes on”.

I’d just read a demonstration of a mistake students commonly make in mathematical proofs. The mistake in question was mixing up the antecedent and the consequent, which I realized I might very well do when flailing in the presence of algebraic expressions. I snapped my fingers, and then wrote the following (bold added afterwards for emphasis.)

I noticed simultaneously-ish that I felt unclear while I followed a proof, and… something else. I was about to tell a story, but what actually happened in my experience?… I think I imagined myself making the mistake that was being demonstrated, and I noticed I didn’t feel surprised, and then I felt… the thing that caused me to snap my fingers. It was like being dizzy, and like being punched in the gut, and like being pulled upward by the middle of the chest. There was something like fear: “I may make this mistake if I simply continue reading and fail to grok this point.”

Compare this note to the previous one. Notice me slowing down in the middle of this note.

In the previous note (the one about proving that 4≠0), I was largely conceptualizing. I told a story about why the experience impacted me however it did, rather than digging into the immediate sensations and trying to capture the impact itself. Here, I stopped in the middle of my story telling, and devoted all of my attention to observing whatever sensations were present. That is the gold standard for phenomenological photography.

During my next analysis session, I picked out that note as my favorite so far.

Why did I like this snapshot?
I think I have a model in which the type of mistake “hug the query” corrects for involves ignoring something and promoting something else. Ignoring what? Ignoring signs of what actually matters, maybe. When I imagine someone asking for credentials when they could very well check the calculations themselves, something is getting covered up.
What’s getting covered up is something very similar to the voice of conscience. It’s the person’s personal sense of… well, perhaps of what is crucial. As though they aren’t allowed to have opinions about what matters, or as though something besides an attempt to learn the truth is pushing their thoughts around, so that they behave in ways that they expect will seem virtuous from the outside, or something.
What I like about my snapshot is that it includes sensations that might be similar to the ones that get covered up when we don’t attend to what is crucial. I don’t think they’re quite representative, or well described, or something. But they’re the right kind of thing.
Oh! And in fact, I now realize that I was a little inclined to cover them up, in the moment. I experienced the familiar pressure to “continue along, nod my head as if I’m following smoothly, as though this is almost boring, as though of course I’m too competent or smart to make this obvious mistake”, but instead I recognized the feeling of something being important, and I stopped and did whatever work was necessary to let it sink it.

This was among the most pivotal moments in my study. Here, I expressed the idea of “the sensations that get covered up when we don’t attend to what is crucial”. I wasn’t clear on what the crucial sensations were, but I had begun to suspect that they were often “covered up” in some way, and that they might correspond to “a feeling of something being important”.

The Study So Far

Can you feel the oscillating rhythm in my scope? I capture the details of immediate experience, and then much later on I look back at that data and start trying to make sense of it. I zoom in, then I zoom out, then I zoom in again.

I do my best not to demand that my observations make sense to me (or to you) while I make them. That way I can eventually fit my sense-making processes to the data, instead of the other way around.

This oscillation is at the heart of my method. I paint constellations after I have looked at the stars themselves, not in the middle of my attempts to see them.

^
Sometimes people are surprised and confused when I make a big deal about “directly observing the world”, only to spend most of my time focused on stuff that exists inside of minds (such as “distraction”).

It is more difficult to see the difference between a concept of distraction and an instance of distraction than to see the difference between the concept of a pool and an instance of a pool. Yet an instance of distraction is a different kind of thing than a concept of distraction, even though both exist inside of minds. In the case of pools, it is relatively easy to know when you have merely activated a concept, and not directly observed an instance. In the case of distraction, it is not so easy. It takes greater skill.
I talk so much about the insides of minds largely because this is when the skills are especially needed.
Instances of distraction may not be part of the “external world” in the sense of existing outside of minds, but they are part of the external world in the sense of existing outside of maps.
^
You can read my log in its entirety here, if you want to see exactly how I contended with this problem.
^
Not that explicit maps are ever the point, even for professional cartographers. Maps are for things. I recognize this. But they’re for predicting future experiences or something, and that was not the point here either.
^
From “Locating Fulcrum Experiences”:

“I often check how fulcrum-y a certain experience seems by using it to fill in the exclamation, “If only I really understood what was happening in the moments when __!” For example, “If only I really understood what was happening in the moments when I’m attempting to relieve psychological discomfort!” When I’ve chosen a really fulcrum-y sort of experience, completing that sentence tends to create a feeling of possibility; sometimes it’s almost like a gigantic tome falling open. Not always, but often.”

Locating My Eyes (Part 3 of “The Sense of Physical Necessity”)

My Goals For This Post

Distraction

Concentration

Crucial

The Study So Far