things that had been too scary for me to think about became thinkable (e.g. regrettable dynamics in my romantic relationships), and I think this is a crucial observation for the rationality project. When you have exile-manager-firefighter dynamics going on and you don’t know how to unblend from them, you cannot think clearly about anything that triggers the exile, and trying to make yourself do it anyway will generate tremendous internal resistance in one form or another (getting angry, getting bored, getting sleepy, getting confused, all sorts of crap), first from managers trying to block the thoughts and then from firefighters trying to distract you from the thoughts. Top priority is noticing that this is happening and then attending to the underlying emotional dynamics.
I think the first three so-called “stages of grief” — denial, anger, and bargaining — are avoidance behaviors. They’re attempts to distract oneself from the painful emotional update. Denial is like trying to focus on anything other than the hurt foot, anger is like clutching and yelling and getting mad at the situation, and bargaining is like trying to rush around and bandage the foot and clean up the blood. In each case, there’s an attempt to keep the mind preoccupied so that it can’t start the process of tracing the pain and letting the agonizing-but-true world come to feel true. It’s as though there’s a part of the psyche that believes it can prevent the horror from being real by avoiding coming to feel as though it’s real. [...]
In every case, the part of the psyche driving the behavior seems to think that it can hold the horror at bay by preventing the emotional update that the horror is real. The problem is, success requires severely distorting your ability to see what is real, and also your desire to see what’s real. This is a cognitive black hole — what I sometimes call a “metacognitive blindspot” — from which it is enormously difficult to return.
This means that if we want to see reality clearly, we have to develop some kind of skill that lets us grieve well — without resistance, without flinching, without screaming to the sky with declarations of war as a distraction from our pain.
We have to be willing to look directly and unwaveringly at horror.
It would be bad if pain weren’t automatically aversive and we had to consciously remember to avoid things that cause it. Instead, we have a really clever automatic system that notices when something is bad or dangerous, grabs our conscious attention to make us change our behavior, and often has us avoiding the problem unconsciously thereafter.
This can result in some really quirky behavior on beyond things like dangerously bending at the waist. For instance, moving or touching ourselves seemstodistractus from painful sensations. So if the goal is to decrease conscious experience of pain, we might find ourselves automatically clutching or rubbing hurt body parts, rocking, or pounding our feet or fists in response to pain. Especially the latter actions probably don’t help much with the injury, but they push some of the pain out of mind, so many of us end up doing this kind of behavior without really knowing why.
Writhing in agony strikes me as a particularly loud example: if some touch and movement can block pain, then maybe more touch and movement can block more pain. So if you’re in extreme pain and the goal is to get away from it, large whole-body movements seem to make sense. (Although I think there might be other reasons we do this too.)
To me, this looks like a Red Queen race, with the two “competitors” being the pain system and the “distract from pain” reflex. First the pain system tries to get our attention and change our behavior (protect a body part, get help, etc.). This is unpleasant, so the look-away reflex grabs onto the nearest available way to stop the experience of pain, and muddles some of the sensation that’s getting labeled as pain. The pain system still perceives a threat, though, so it turns up the volume so to speak. And then the look-away reflex encourages us to look even more wildly for a way out, which causes pain’s volume to go up even more….
The bit about a Red Queen race sounds to me exactly like the description of an exile/firefighter dynamic, though of course there’s a deeper bit there about some things being so painful as to trigger a firefighter response even if one didn’t exist previously. Probably everyone has some “generic” firefighters built right into the psyche which are our default response to anything sufficiently uncomfortable—similar to the part in my robot design which mentioned that
If a certain threshold level of “distress” is reached, the current situation is designated as catastrophic. All other priorities are suspended and the robot will prioritize getting out of the situation.
even before I started talking about specialized firefighters dedicated to keeping some specific exiles actually exiled. And in the context of something like physical pain or fear of a predator, just having a firefighter response that’s seeking to minimize the amount of experienced distress signal makes sense. The presence of the distress signal is directly correlated with the extent of danger or potential threat, so just having “minimize the presence of this signal” works as an optimization criteria which is in turn directly correlated with optimizing survival.
But when we get to things like “thinking about romantic success” or “thinking about existential risk”, it’s no longer neatly the case that simply not experiencing the stress of thinking about those things is useful for avoiding them...
Yes!
Valentine has also written some good stuff on this, in e.g. The Art of Grieving Well:
and also in Looking into the Abyss:
The bit about a Red Queen race sounds to me exactly like the description of an exile/firefighter dynamic, though of course there’s a deeper bit there about some things being so painful as to trigger a firefighter response even if one didn’t exist previously. Probably everyone has some “generic” firefighters built right into the psyche which are our default response to anything sufficiently uncomfortable—similar to the part in my robot design which mentioned that
even before I started talking about specialized firefighters dedicated to keeping some specific exiles actually exiled. And in the context of something like physical pain or fear of a predator, just having a firefighter response that’s seeking to minimize the amount of experienced distress signal makes sense. The presence of the distress signal is directly correlated with the extent of danger or potential threat, so just having “minimize the presence of this signal” works as an optimization criteria which is in turn directly correlated with optimizing survival.
But when we get to things like “thinking about romantic success” or “thinking about existential risk”, it’s no longer neatly the case that simply not experiencing the stress of thinking about those things is useful for avoiding them...