This distinction alone is huge when you look at IFS’ Exiles. If you have an “exile” that is struggling to be capable of doing something, but only knows how to be in distress, it’s helpful to realize that it’s just the built-in mental muscle of “seeking care via distress”, and that it will never be capable of doing anything else. It’s not the distressed “part”’s job to do things or be capable of things, and never was. That’s the job of the “everyday self”—the set of mental muscles for actual autonomy and action. But as long as someone’s reinforced pattern is to activate the “distress” muscle, then they will feel horrible and helpless and not able to do anything about it.
I wonder how much of this discussion comes down to a different extensional referent of the word “part”.
According to my view, I would call “the reinforced pattern to activate the ‘distress’ muscle [in some specific set of circumstances]” a part. That’s the thing that I would want to dialogue with.
In contrast, I would not call the “distress muscle” itself a part, because (as you say) the distress muscle doesn’t haven anything like “beliefs” that could update.
According to my view, I would call “the reinforced pattern to activate the ‘distress’ muscle [in some specific set of circumstances]” a part. That’s the thing that I would want to dialogue with.
And I don’t understand how you could “dialogue” with such a thing, except in the metaphorical sense where debugging is a “dialogue” with the software or hardware in question. I don’t ask a stimulus-respponse pattern to explain itself, I dialogue with the client or with my inner experience by trying things or running queries, and the answers I get back are whatever the machine does in response.
I don’t pretend that the behavior pattern is a coherent entity with which I can have a conversation in English, as for me that approach has only ever resulted in confusion, or at best some occasionally good but largely irreproducible results.
And I specifically coach clients not to interpret those responses they get, but just to report the bare fact of what is seen or felt or heard, because the purpose is not to have a conversation but to conduct an investigation or troubleshooting process.
A stimulus-response pattern doesn’t have goals or fears; goals or fears are things we have, that we get from our SR rules as emergent properties. That’s why treating them as intentional agents makes no sense to me: they’re what our agency is made of, but they themselves are not a class of thing that could even comprehend such a thing as the notion of agency.
Schemas are mental models, not utilitarian agents… not even in a theoretical sense! Humans don’t weigh utility, we have an action planner system that queries our predictive model for “what looks like something good to do in this situation”, and whatever comes back fastest tends to win, with emotionally weighted stuff or stuff tagged by certain mental muscles getting wired into faster routes.
To put it another way, I think the thing you’re thinking you can dialogue with is actually a spandrel of sorts, and it’s a higher-level unit than what I work with. IFS, in ascribing intention, necessarily has to look at more complex elements than raw, miniscule, almost “atomic” stimulus-response patterns, because that’s what’s required if you want to make a coherent-sounding model of an entire cycle of symptoms.
In contrast, for me the top-down view of symptom cycles is merely a guide or suggestion to begin an empirical investigation of specific repeatable responses. The larger pattern, after all, is made of things: it doesn’t just exist on its own. It’s made of smaller, simpler things whose behaviors are much more predictable and repeatable. The larger behavior cycles inevitably involve countless minor variations, but the rules that generate the cycles are much more deterministic in nature, making them more amenable to direct hacking.
I wonder how much of this discussion comes down to a different extensional referent of the word “part”.
According to my view, I would call “the reinforced pattern to activate the ‘distress’ muscle [in some specific set of circumstances]” a part. That’s the thing that I would want to dialogue with.
In contrast, I would not call the “distress muscle” itself a part, because (as you say) the distress muscle doesn’t haven anything like “beliefs” that could update.
In that frame, do you still have an objection?
And I don’t understand how you could “dialogue” with such a thing, except in the metaphorical sense where debugging is a “dialogue” with the software or hardware in question. I don’t ask a stimulus-respponse pattern to explain itself, I dialogue with the client or with my inner experience by trying things or running queries, and the answers I get back are whatever the machine does in response.
I don’t pretend that the behavior pattern is a coherent entity with which I can have a conversation in English, as for me that approach has only ever resulted in confusion, or at best some occasionally good but largely irreproducible results.
And I specifically coach clients not to interpret those responses they get, but just to report the bare fact of what is seen or felt or heard, because the purpose is not to have a conversation but to conduct an investigation or troubleshooting process.
A stimulus-response pattern doesn’t have goals or fears; goals or fears are things we have, that we get from our SR rules as emergent properties. That’s why treating them as intentional agents makes no sense to me: they’re what our agency is made of, but they themselves are not a class of thing that could even comprehend such a thing as the notion of agency.
Schemas are mental models, not utilitarian agents… not even in a theoretical sense! Humans don’t weigh utility, we have an action planner system that queries our predictive model for “what looks like something good to do in this situation”, and whatever comes back fastest tends to win, with emotionally weighted stuff or stuff tagged by certain mental muscles getting wired into faster routes.
To put it another way, I think the thing you’re thinking you can dialogue with is actually a spandrel of sorts, and it’s a higher-level unit than what I work with. IFS, in ascribing intention, necessarily has to look at more complex elements than raw, miniscule, almost “atomic” stimulus-response patterns, because that’s what’s required if you want to make a coherent-sounding model of an entire cycle of symptoms.
In contrast, for me the top-down view of symptom cycles is merely a guide or suggestion to begin an empirical investigation of specific repeatable responses. The larger pattern, after all, is made of things: it doesn’t just exist on its own. It’s made of smaller, simpler things whose behaviors are much more predictable and repeatable. The larger behavior cycles inevitably involve countless minor variations, but the rules that generate the cycles are much more deterministic in nature, making them more amenable to direct hacking.