When we need to enlist the help of our subconscious, it seems there is a need for useful deceptions… The reason this seems counterintuitive may be that we consider ourselves to be operating directly on physical and social reality, but we are not. We are going through a convoluted stack of legacy hardware that is antiquated but powerful. To make things worse, the abstractions it uses are broken. So if a parameter is ‘Current Status In Tribe’, this makes no sense today, for one thing, there is no tribe. However we know that inserting the value ‘high’ in that slot produces roughly desirable outcomes.
In that sense, the thought ‘I am dominant’ is not one that is directed to the conscious. We don’t use it to calibrate our model of reality. It is directed towards the legacy stack. In that sense it may be thought to be a meaningless parameter of purely instrumental use. However the legacy junk is a bit smarter than that, you need to believe it to some degree. Wait… does this mean doublethink can be a useful tool?
I think I see where you are going with the dark side reference.
When we need to enlist the help of our subconscious, it seems there is a need for useful deceptions… The reason this seems counterintuitive may be that we consider ourselves to be operating directly on physical and social reality, but we are not. We are going through a convoluted stack of legacy hardware that is antiquated but powerful. To make things worse, the abstractions it uses are broken. So if a parameter is ‘Current Status In Tribe’, this makes no sense today, for one thing, there is no tribe. However we know that inserting the value ‘high’ in that slot produces roughly desirable outcomes.
In that sense, the thought ‘I am dominant’ is not one that is directed to the conscious. We don’t use it to calibrate our model of reality. It is directed towards the legacy stack. In that sense it may be thought to be a meaningless parameter of purely instrumental use. However the legacy junk is a bit smarter than that, you need to believe it to some degree. Wait… does this mean doublethink can be a useful tool?
I think I see where you are going with the dark side reference.
It’s not doublethink… it’s refraining from doubt. In other words, it’s single-think. If you’re doublethinking, you’re doing it wrong.