Hm, perhaps you imagine that I’m about to spend a whole sequence advocating for studying your mind without engaging with the world?
I suspect you’re employing a distinction that I do not honor.
I mean, to use the example in the essay, when are these fulcrum experiences of eg “puppeteering myself” going to show up? Not when I’m sitting in a lounge chair introspecting. Most of what I am actually doing with myself lately is 1) writing, editing, and publishing essays (and making paintings for them), 2) navigating the third trimester of pregnancy (dealing with a ton of stuff about how my body works, learning about birth, learning about tiny children, working with midwives and doulas and so forth), and 3) setting up my environment so that it will support me and my family when we have very little attention to spare (building garden boxes, getting the wild-bird-feeding arrangement just right so I don’t have to fix it later, setting up my recovery space, improving systems around food and other maintenance activities, other stuff). So when I notice “puppeteering myself” (if I choose to study that), it will happen when I realize that someone more skilled at construction than me is watching me secure hardware cloth with fence staples. It will happen when a commenter points out a possible flaw in my attempt to navigate the tricky balance between fidelity and brevity in written examples. It will happen when my bush strokes do not accomplish the visual effect I believe I have imagined, because I was in fact imagining a social role rather than any particular physical shape or hue. It will happen when I have a disagreement with my primary care doctor about the risks and benefits of taking a certain medication at this point in pregnancy. It will happen when I try to figure out why the Stellar’s Jay near my feeder keeps making sounds that imitate a red-tailed hawk.
The entire time, no matter whether you topic seems more stereotypically “internal” or “external”, naturalism it is really about your internal experience in contact with the external world. There’s not really such a thing as an internal topic or an external topic. The methodology focuses on the interface.
hmm, this way this convo is going feels… maybe more fighty than I intended (or at least wanted in retrospect)
I do think “I’m holding a distinction that you don’t hold” is probably relevant, and I am interested in talking about it more. But maybe what I want to do next is go reread the previous post and actually think about the sort of things I might want to study.
>I think one thing is that I’m currently thinking a lot in terms of “a good art of rationality should involve contact with the territory [of things other than your mind and the rationality-or-lack-thereof-that-lives-inside it]” (which I think is a thing you also believe?)
Yes, I do indeed think that a good art of rationality should involve contact with mind-independent territory. Constantly. Relentlessly. I… I think that’s a thesis of the naturalist program? It is why I’m all “and you will observe these things in daily life: as you engage with your projects at work (which may involve coding, or math, or cooking, or whatever it is you do), as you read bedtime stories to your children, as you learn underwater basket weaving, whatever.” Like, do not just sit here and read and think until you think you have things figured out inside of your head. Go do stuff, go try to understand how the world works in practice. Not in the context of this essay, not in the context of a one hour class or a four day workshop, but in the context of how you actually navigate the world on a daily basis.
Hm, perhaps you imagine that I’m about to spend a whole sequence advocating for studying your mind without engaging with the world?
I suspect you’re employing a distinction that I do not honor.
I mean, to use the example in the essay, when are these fulcrum experiences of eg “puppeteering myself” going to show up? Not when I’m sitting in a lounge chair introspecting. Most of what I am actually doing with myself lately is 1) writing, editing, and publishing essays (and making paintings for them), 2) navigating the third trimester of pregnancy (dealing with a ton of stuff about how my body works, learning about birth, learning about tiny children, working with midwives and doulas and so forth), and 3) setting up my environment so that it will support me and my family when we have very little attention to spare (building garden boxes, getting the wild-bird-feeding arrangement just right so I don’t have to fix it later, setting up my recovery space, improving systems around food and other maintenance activities, other stuff). So when I notice “puppeteering myself” (if I choose to study that), it will happen when I realize that someone more skilled at construction than me is watching me secure hardware cloth with fence staples. It will happen when a commenter points out a possible flaw in my attempt to navigate the tricky balance between fidelity and brevity in written examples. It will happen when my bush strokes do not accomplish the visual effect I believe I have imagined, because I was in fact imagining a social role rather than any particular physical shape or hue. It will happen when I have a disagreement with my primary care doctor about the risks and benefits of taking a certain medication at this point in pregnancy. It will happen when I try to figure out why the Stellar’s Jay near my feeder keeps making sounds that imitate a red-tailed hawk.
The entire time, no matter whether you topic seems more stereotypically “internal” or “external”, naturalism it is really about your internal experience in contact with the external world. There’s not really such a thing as an internal topic or an external topic. The methodology focuses on the interface.
hmm, this way this convo is going feels… maybe more fighty than I intended (or at least wanted in retrospect)
I do think “I’m holding a distinction that you don’t hold” is probably relevant, and I am interested in talking about it more. But maybe what I want to do next is go reread the previous post and actually think about the sort of things I might want to study.
>I think one thing is that I’m currently thinking a lot in terms of “a good art of rationality should involve contact with the territory [of things other than your mind and the rationality-or-lack-thereof-that-lives-inside it]” (which I think is a thing you also believe?)
Yes, I do indeed think that a good art of rationality should involve contact with mind-independent territory. Constantly. Relentlessly. I… I think that’s a thesis of the naturalist program? It is why I’m all “and you will observe these things in daily life: as you engage with your projects at work (which may involve coding, or math, or cooking, or whatever it is you do), as you read bedtime stories to your children, as you learn underwater basket weaving, whatever.” Like, do not just sit here and read and think until you think you have things figured out inside of your head. Go do stuff, go try to understand how the world works in practice. Not in the context of this essay, not in the context of a one hour class or a four day workshop, but in the context of how you actually navigate the world on a daily basis.