...you will think to yourself, “And now, I will irrationally believe that I will win the lottery, in order to make myself happy.” But we do not have such direct control over our beliefs. You cannot make yourself believe the sky is green by an act of will.
In my experience, this is not true.
My father was a dentist, and when I was 7 he learned hypnosis to use to anesthetise his patients. Of course he practiced on me while he was learning. (As it turned out, he did successful anesthesia with it for a few years before people started spreading stories that hypnosis was dangerous mind-control and he quit.)
With posthypnotic suggestion people can easily believe things that they have no reason to believe, remember things they did not experience, and ignore their senses up to a point. I’ve done it. It all feels real.
I learned to hypnotise people a little, and I learned how to do it on myself. It certainly can be done. You do have that control over your beliefs, if you’re willing to use it.
Which is not to say it’s a good idea. IME the main time it’s useful to make yourself believe something is when you have nothing to lose by burning your bridges, when you lose everything anyway if the belief is wrong. Then you might as well believe it wholeheartedly.
I’ve read that interest in hypnosis has something like an eleven year cycle. People start to think there’s something interesting there. They start studying it, and get some fascinating results that look some ways powerful. Then as they keep studying they find that all the unexpected things people can do under hypnosis they can also do without hypnosis. And then they start to see that a lot of people are basicly walking around hypnotised a lot of the time. They start to wonder what exactly they’re studying, and they quit, and after the subject lies fallow awhile more people get interested and it starts again.
Basicly all it takes for hypnosis is that the person relax and listen uncritically. If they’re willing to believe what they’re told, they’re hypnotised. All the peculiar abilities people sometimes display when told to under hypnosis, are things they could do but normally don’t believe they can do. When they give up their scepticism they go ahead and do their best instead of doubting themselves and hesitating. They’re willing to believe delusions for somebody they trust, and when the limits of the trust show up or they get emphatic evidence against the delusion, then they rethink.
You really can deceive yourself. You can build false memories and believe them. You can make the sky look a little green, particularly on a cloudy day, and you can build on that until it looks pretty green—provided the idea of a green sky doesn’t offend you too much. If you believe it’s impossible you can’t see it. If it’s “I didn’t know that was even possible, I wonder why it’s happening now?” then you can.
These are things that anybody can learn to do. But I mostly agree with your arguments that it is not generally a useful skill. If I get a toothache I don’t anesthetise it until after I get my dentist appointment, and if I miss the appointment the pain comes back. Pain is your signal that something is going wrong with your body, and in general it’s a bad idea to ignore that.
False memories are horrifyingly easy to induce. Here is a Scientific American story on the subject from 1997, and here is a scary story from an ex-Scientologist about how to induce false memories using Scientology auditing. “Up to this day, I intellectually know that this story was a fiction written by a friend of mine, but still I have it in vivid memory, as if I was the very person that had experienced it. I actually can’t differentiate this memory from any other of my real memories, it still is as valid in my mind as any other memory I have.”
Human memories are untrustworthy. This leads to a philosophical dilemma about whether or not to trust your memory, and how much, and what you’re supposed to use if you can’t trust your memory.
Not everyone can be hypnotized. About a quarter of people can’t be hypnotized, according to research at Stanford.
I’ve tried to be hypnotized before and it didn’t work. I think I’m just not capable of making myself that open to suggestion, even though I would have liked to have been hypnotized.
I heard from one of my psychology professors that those on the extreme ends of the IQ spectrum (both high and low) have more trouble being hypnotized, but I’m not sure if this is actually true. The Stanford research showed that hypnotizability wasn’t correlated with any personality traits, but I probably wouldn’t consider IQ a personality trait.
...you will think to yourself, “And now, I will irrationally believe that I will win the lottery, in order to make myself happy.” But we do not have such direct control over our beliefs. You cannot make yourself believe the sky is green by an act of will.
In my experience, this is not true.
My father was a dentist, and when I was 7 he learned hypnosis to use to anesthetise his patients. Of course he practiced on me while he was learning. (As it turned out, he did successful anesthesia with it for a few years before people started spreading stories that hypnosis was dangerous mind-control and he quit.)
With posthypnotic suggestion people can easily believe things that they have no reason to believe, remember things they did not experience, and ignore their senses up to a point. I’ve done it. It all feels real.
I learned to hypnotise people a little, and I learned how to do it on myself. It certainly can be done. You do have that control over your beliefs, if you’re willing to use it.
Which is not to say it’s a good idea. IME the main time it’s useful to make yourself believe something is when you have nothing to lose by burning your bridges, when you lose everything anyway if the belief is wrong. Then you might as well believe it wholeheartedly.
I’ve read that interest in hypnosis has something like an eleven year cycle. People start to think there’s something interesting there. They start studying it, and get some fascinating results that look some ways powerful. Then as they keep studying they find that all the unexpected things people can do under hypnosis they can also do without hypnosis. And then they start to see that a lot of people are basicly walking around hypnotised a lot of the time. They start to wonder what exactly they’re studying, and they quit, and after the subject lies fallow awhile more people get interested and it starts again.
Basicly all it takes for hypnosis is that the person relax and listen uncritically. If they’re willing to believe what they’re told, they’re hypnotised. All the peculiar abilities people sometimes display when told to under hypnosis, are things they could do but normally don’t believe they can do. When they give up their scepticism they go ahead and do their best instead of doubting themselves and hesitating. They’re willing to believe delusions for somebody they trust, and when the limits of the trust show up or they get emphatic evidence against the delusion, then they rethink.
You really can deceive yourself. You can build false memories and believe them. You can make the sky look a little green, particularly on a cloudy day, and you can build on that until it looks pretty green—provided the idea of a green sky doesn’t offend you too much. If you believe it’s impossible you can’t see it. If it’s “I didn’t know that was even possible, I wonder why it’s happening now?” then you can.
These are things that anybody can learn to do. But I mostly agree with your arguments that it is not generally a useful skill. If I get a toothache I don’t anesthetise it until after I get my dentist appointment, and if I miss the appointment the pain comes back. Pain is your signal that something is going wrong with your body, and in general it’s a bad idea to ignore that.
False memories are horrifyingly easy to induce. Here is a Scientific American story on the subject from 1997, and here is a scary story from an ex-Scientologist about how to induce false memories using Scientology auditing. “Up to this day, I intellectually know that this story was a fiction written by a friend of mine, but still I have it in vivid memory, as if I was the very person that had experienced it. I actually can’t differentiate this memory from any other of my real memories, it still is as valid in my mind as any other memory I have.”
Human memories are untrustworthy. This leads to a philosophical dilemma about whether or not to trust your memory, and how much, and what you’re supposed to use if you can’t trust your memory.
Not everyone can be hypnotized. About a quarter of people can’t be hypnotized, according to research at Stanford.
I’ve tried to be hypnotized before and it didn’t work. I think I’m just not capable of making myself that open to suggestion, even though I would have liked to have been hypnotized.
I heard from one of my psychology professors that those on the extreme ends of the IQ spectrum (both high and low) have more trouble being hypnotized, but I’m not sure if this is actually true. The Stanford research showed that hypnotizability wasn’t correlated with any personality traits, but I probably wouldn’t consider IQ a personality trait.