Claim: this sequence is almost one hundred percent about studying something other than your mind, and what’s happening is a confusion between tools and purposes.
At a very coarse/gross level of understanding, the way that we gather information about objects is by hurling other objects at them, and watching the interaction. This is one way to think about light—we throw trillions of tiny photons at an object, and the way they bounce off gives us information about the object (its location, shape, surface properties, etc).
Ditto sound waves, now that I think of it (the photon analogy is from Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe).
The key point is that we never quite interact directly with the object. We do on human scales; there’s a thing we call “direct interaction” that makes sense to talk about. But actually what’s going on is that we’re perceiving photons that are out there hurtling through the void, and constructing understanding via extrapolation about what those photons interacted with a fraction of a second earlier.
We don’t talk about “studying the photons” when we describe looking at an object, though. We gloss over that step, handwave it away.
This sequence is, I think, about looking at things other than your brain.
But it focuses on the analogue of the photons themselves. It’s looking through your own phenomenology, to understand what’s really going on out there. It’s saying (roughly) “notice how these photons bounce off this way, and these other photons bounce off that way, and these other photons get absorbed, and see what you can reasonably conclude about the object, given those facts.”
So there’s a heavy focus on your own perceptions, and your emotional reactions, and so forth, but it’s in service of understanding the object that is upstream of [your brain reacting in such a way].
Honestly, I was somewhat surprised to hear @Raemon ’s complaint, and at first bewildered/taken aback, because it hadn’t even occurred to me that this sequence might be mistaken for being about minds/brains. But of course it does talk a lot about the internals of one’s experience, so I understand the confusion! Ray’s complaint isn’t coming out of nowhere!
But to tack on yet another analogy, I feel sort of like just … reassuring the complaint away? In the same way that, if I were teaching a parkour class and a student was like, wait, why are we doing pushups and stretches, I thought we were here to do vaults, I would be like yes, yes, don’t worry, we are absolutely getting to the vaults, but this is important preparation for the vaults, and will help you build up the strength and physical vocabulary necessary to be non-lost once we start working on the vaults, which is coming right up, actually.
I don’t know that a response here is specifically needed. I thought about adding a line “to be clear, I think there’s clearly enough content to warrant a course/practice/sequence focused on the thing I now-understand-this-sequence-to-be-about, so, like, I’m not saying you should have written a different thing or whatever.”
I meant my second paragraph to just be “here’s what I was expecting, fwiw” (without claiming that was, like, an appropriate thing to expect) and the first paragraph to be “here’s some model I have on my mind that I’d interested in talking about, as part of a longer term conversation about how to push the art of rationality forward”, but, not necessarily super relevant to this sequence.
I’m not sure how to respond to this, and for some reason I want to know if @Duncan_Sabien has anything to say.
Claim: this sequence is almost one hundred percent about studying something other than your mind, and what’s happening is a confusion between tools and purposes.
At a very coarse/gross level of understanding, the way that we gather information about objects is by hurling other objects at them, and watching the interaction. This is one way to think about light—we throw trillions of tiny photons at an object, and the way they bounce off gives us information about the object (its location, shape, surface properties, etc).
Ditto sound waves, now that I think of it (the photon analogy is from Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe).
The key point is that we never quite interact directly with the object. We do on human scales; there’s a thing we call “direct interaction” that makes sense to talk about. But actually what’s going on is that we’re perceiving photons that are out there hurtling through the void, and constructing understanding via extrapolation about what those photons interacted with a fraction of a second earlier.
We don’t talk about “studying the photons” when we describe looking at an object, though. We gloss over that step, handwave it away.
This sequence is, I think, about looking at things other than your brain.
But it focuses on the analogue of the photons themselves. It’s looking through your own phenomenology, to understand what’s really going on out there. It’s saying (roughly) “notice how these photons bounce off this way, and these other photons bounce off that way, and these other photons get absorbed, and see what you can reasonably conclude about the object, given those facts.”
So there’s a heavy focus on your own perceptions, and your emotional reactions, and so forth, but it’s in service of understanding the object that is upstream of [your brain reacting in such a way].
Honestly, I was somewhat surprised to hear @Raemon ’s complaint, and at first bewildered/taken aback, because it hadn’t even occurred to me that this sequence might be mistaken for being about minds/brains. But of course it does talk a lot about the internals of one’s experience, so I understand the confusion! Ray’s complaint isn’t coming out of nowhere!
But to tack on yet another analogy, I feel sort of like just … reassuring the complaint away? In the same way that, if I were teaching a parkour class and a student was like, wait, why are we doing pushups and stretches, I thought we were here to do vaults, I would be like yes, yes, don’t worry, we are absolutely getting to the vaults, but this is important preparation for the vaults, and will help you build up the strength and physical vocabulary necessary to be non-lost once we start working on the vaults, which is coming right up, actually.
@Raemon FYI there isn’t internet at our place since ~26h ago so Logan probably hasn’t looked at this or any other responses yet.
I don’t know that a response here is specifically needed. I thought about adding a line “to be clear, I think there’s clearly enough content to warrant a course/practice/sequence focused on the thing I now-understand-this-sequence-to-be-about, so, like, I’m not saying you should have written a different thing or whatever.”
I meant my second paragraph to just be “here’s what I was expecting, fwiw” (without claiming that was, like, an appropriate thing to expect) and the first paragraph to be “here’s some model I have on my mind that I’d interested in talking about, as part of a longer term conversation about how to push the art of rationality forward”, but, not necessarily super relevant to this sequence.