This is the seventh post in a sequence that demonstrates a complete naturalist study, specifically a study of query hugging (sort of), as described in The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism. This one demos phase four: Experimentation. For context on this sequence, see the intro post. Reminder that this is meant as reference material.
Wait, there’s more to this study? But we’ve just discussed the main insight that came out of it, and how it illustrates the point of naturalism. Why is there more?
There is more because by this point I was interested not only in insights, but in mastery. There is more to mastery than reconceptualization.
However, I would like to point out that everything I’d done so far preceded experimentation. I had not even begun to try to change anything—yet I had learned quite a lot, through mere observation without interference. This is why many naturalist studies are complete before experimentation even begins. Often, this level of understanding is all that’s needed.
But sometimes one further step is necessary. You can tell that you should move on to “Experimentation” if you feel grounded about your study topic, if you think you’ve really trained yourself to notice and directly observe what’s there in whatever realm you’ve focused on—but you still have an unsatisfied curiosity about how to behave around your topic.
In this case, when I arrived at the end of Collection, I found that I wanted to know what was possible. I wanted to move freely around this chest luster, this sense of physical necessity; to explore its boundaries and the actions available to me in the presence of that experience (and its antecedents). So, I chose to continue my study.
If you’re constantly observing in response to a stimulus, rather than immediately taking whatever action you ordinarily would by default, then you have already taken the most crucial step toward breaking a default stimulus-response pattern. You have already created a space between the stimulus and your original default response.
In the Experimentation phase of naturalist study, you’ll use actions that are larger than “observation” to stretch that space. You’ll experiment with saying this, thinking that, or moving your body in such and such a way, until the link between the stimulus and your default response has been severed entirely.
By creating space for alternative action, I mean breaking an existing pattern of stimulus-response, and replacing the default action with agency.
Some beta readers felt confused during the upcoming section. They seemed to think that if I’m changing a stimulus-response pattern, it must be because I’ve recognized one as unsatisfactory, and now I hope to improve it—that something was broken, and I hope to fix it. They wanted me to describe the old broken pattern, so they could follow my changes as possible improvements.
That’s not what I’m up to here.
I’ve had trouble communicating about naturalist experimentation in the past, and I’m not sure I’ll do any better this time around. For whatever it’s worth, though, here’s my latest attempt.
*
Mary Robinette Kowal is both a fiction author and a professional puppeteer. In one of my favorite episodes of the podcast Writing Excuses, she discusses how her background in puppetry has influenced the way she writes.
She talks about four principles of puppetry, the first of which is focus: “Focus indicates thought.”
When bringing a puppet to life for an audience, it’s important to always consider what external objects the puppet is cognitively or emotionally engaged with, and to make sure its eyes are pointing at those objects. This is the audience’s primary cue about the puppet’s thoughts. If the puppet turns and points its eyes toward a bird, the audience perceives the puppet as not only looking toward that bird, but thinking about the bird as well. If you have the puppet talk about the bird while staring in a random direction, this will likely break the illusion you’re trying to build in the minds of your audience, the illusion that the puppet has a rich inner life of its own.
In fiction, Kowal uses this same trick to reveal character and motive. What a character focuses on as they look around tells us a lot about how they think: what matters to them, what they’re interested in, what it feels like to be that particular person moving through the world in that moment.
If I recall correctly, she suggests a writing exercise where you describe the same room from the perspective of three different characters. A person who’s broken into the room to steal secret documents might mainly notice a series of potential hiding places: features of a bookshelf, a tapestry covering part of the wall, a drawer with a lock. By contrast, someone who is trapped in that same room will spend much more of their attention on the door and windows.
In the early 20th century, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll was interested in how organisms perceive their environments.
Setting aside the question of phenomenal consciousness—whether there is something it is like to be a cat, or a sea urchin, or an oak tree—it’s at least evident that species with different physical sensory capacities respond to different sensory inputs.
The pothos plant on my bookcase grows toward the nearby window. As I understand it, my plant does this because its tissues contain a growth hormone that is destroyed by sunlight. The shady side of its tendrils grows longer than the sunny side, and so the tendrils bend in the direction of the light.
Uexküll would call light a part of the plant’s subjective environment, or umwelt. Light is in the plant’s umwelt not just because light is physically present around the plant, but because it is sensed by the plant.
By contrast, the adult Mexican tetra, aka “blind cavefish”, inhabits an umwelt that has nothing to do with light. Its subjective world is instead dominated by fluctuations in water pressure, which it senses through a lateral line organ—specialized epithelial cells across its body that are similar to the tiny cochlear hairs inside a human ear.
The world must seem very different to pothos plants and cave fish. Indeed, cave pools are objectively very different environments from tropical understories. But if you put a pothos in a cave, it would still behave as though trying to climb a tree (just as it’s doing on my bookshelf). It would remain sensitive to light, and would not suddenly inhabit an umwelt of fluctuating water pressure, however useful that change might be.
*
There is more to umwelt, I think, than raw sensory capacity.
A person who searches a room for secret documents does not perceive the same things as a person who is trapped in that room, even if they are both humans with identically functional sense organs. In the subjective world of the thief, the door barely exists. For the prisoner, the door is nearly all there is.
The first three phases of naturalism gradually welcome a new sensation into the student’s umwelt. They take a sensation that seems so meaningless as to be practically insensible, and turn it into a part of the subjective world to which the student responds. It is almost like giving eyes to a cave fish.
The final phase of naturalism, “experimentation”, is a deliberate exploration of the student’s new umwelt. It is the phase where they learn not only to be aware of some new feature of their world, but to respond to it deliberately, gracefully, masterfully. It is the phase where the cave fish learns to paint.
Gaining reflective awareness of a crucial sensation is often enough to accomplish whatever a student originally cared about. This proved to be the case in my study of “Hug the Query”; I was automatically performing the skills I set out to gain, just by expanding my umwelt to include “a sense of physical necessity”. Experimentation was sort of “extra credit”, with respect to my original goals.
But what I learned through experimentation set me on a path toward deep mastery of the new domain, rather than just basic competence with it.
You don’t always have to explore the space of alternative action around a fulcrum experience to achieve basic competence with it. But if you’re after extensive familiarity, accurate factional knowledge, richly detailed predictive models, and thorough practical mastery—if, gaining eyes, you suspect that you would like to paint, to succeed at a newly available range of tasks that you haven’t even thought to imagine yet—then experimentation is called for.
Experimentation was brief this time around, just a single session before I felt satisfied. I followed my standard instructions exactly: Reminding myself of the antecedents of my fulcrum experience, listing possible alternative actions, choosing one or two to try, and then trying them.
(My study of real analysis was taking a detour into type theory that day, so I did all of this while thinking about types.)
I had access to fine enough granularity by this point that I recognized four distinct periods in the moments leading up to luster, which I called “gathering”, “focusing”, “aiming”, and “releasing”. The default stimulus-response chain seemed to go gathering→focusing, focusing→aiming, aiming→releasing, releasing→ luster. My plan was to perform some sort of non-default action at any point in that chain before “luster”, and to observe what resulted.
I considered a few possible actions, and settled on two: First I would try reciting a certain stanza of poetry in response to gathering and aiming. Then I would try broadening my focus in response to gathering and aiming, which I thought might be interesting since it is sort of the opposite motion.
Why did I choose to start by reciting poetry? One correct but incomplete answer is that I like poetry and think about it often, so it was on my mind. I take nearly every opportunity to weave poetry (and other art) into the things I do, because my life is just better that way. Poetry was on my mind even more than usual at the time, because I had just finished learning “Ulalume” by Poe.
But the other reason is that poetry recitation seemed like 1) an action similar enough to the default that I’d likely have an easy time continuing to observe in the same way I’d been practicing, and 2) a fairly neutral, unrelated action whose outcome I was not at all invested in. I think it’s similar to choosing sugar tablets for a placebo control.
I recorded three instances of the “luster antecedents→poetry recitation” pattern.
Poetry: First Instance
I noticed the “gathering” sensation as the possibility of trying to articulate what I currently think types might be came to mind, the gathering/concentration with an anticipation of future-luster. I recited the stanza.
I’m… not very clear on what happened. I think I may have rushed through the stanza; certainly it wasn’t a “full recitation” in the sense of really instantiating the poem. It was the minimum amount of imaginative activation necessary for me to reproduce the words themselves.
This exercise felt a little silly and artificial, of course, and I was eager to get it over with so I could focus back on “types”. But afterward, I find that I’m a little less eager to try to say what I think types might be than I was before the poem, as though my enthusiasm for the task dissipated somewhat. Indeed, as I try to return to “saying what types might be”, that task now feels a bit artificial. I’ve lost partner connection, and will have to re-establish it to feel a similar motivation.
Poetry: Second Instance
I felt a slower gathering, more like a dawning, but still toward the focusing/aiming/releasing that leads to luster. This time I recited the stanza more fully (with more imaginative and emotional engagement). I experienced less clinging/grasping/suffering-of-distraction than last time.
I again have to re-establish partner connection with territory (the thing going on beneath the sentence, “One problem is that ^φ→bottom is not a term, it’s a formula.”)
Poetry: Third Instance
Haha ok well that was interesting. I don’t immediately remember what happened before poetry recitation, though I can probably reconstruct most of it. But I couldn’t remember which stanza I’d chosen and started reciting a different stanza, and this one hits considerably harder. I almost cried and it really shoved whatever I was doing before that out of my brain. Um. Ah, something about the notation for variables in the metalanguage. I believe I was booting up my orientation to the metalanguage and confusions I have about it, or something along those lines. I was in the “gathering” phase of the luster progression.
The main thing I observed as a result of this intervention was a need to “re-establish partner connection” afterward. It turned out that I’d accidentally ended up in an exercise where I repeatedly recovered my sense of the physical necessity of things after having lost it. I think this is a great example of how it can be valuable to practice doing literally anything besides the default in the moments surrounding a fulcrum experience.
Happy with my first intervention, I moved to the next: In response to the antecedents of luster, I would broaden my focus, without shifting my foveal awareness.
I took a minute to practice this motion on its own, to be sure I knew what my plan was.
The vision-focused version of the movement is pretty easy to demonstrate: Pick a spot on the wall to focus on, then try to become aware of more and more of your visual field around it, letting your attentional focus broaden without moving your eyes.
My plan was to do that same broadening, but with respect to whatever my attention happened to be focusing on in the moment when I noticed any part of the gathering→focusing→aiming sequence, whether the object was in my visual field or some other perceptual field.
I again recorded three instances of the intervention.
Broadening: First Instance
Wow ok fascinating. Uh, what actually resulted is that I was unable to continue forming words.
The thought around which I felt a gathering sensation involved what it is for something to be a variable in the metalanguage. I left foveal awareness on that thought, and began making a note in the margin, then broadened attentional focus as I wrote, and… could not continue writing.
I don’t know whether broad focus is incompatible with word-making, or whether the unfamiliar deliberate attentional practice overloaded me, or something else. But that’s what happened. My note got as far as “And we” and then stopped. (Afterward, the note turned out to be, “And we can’t just write ‘alpha’ without a hat ’cause that would indicate a particular type.”)
Broadening: Second Instance
This time, I felt the gathering and aiming, and I intervened to broaden attention before releasing began. What resulted was a softly receptive orientation toward what I was reading.
It was like I was “only making sense of things in the background”. I was… something like unattached to where the phrases landed. I wasn’t immediately desirous that they land in any particular place or manner. It was as though I was reading just to see what would happen.
There was certainly a struggle, though; part of me really did not want to be “disengaged” in this way. It was somewhat uncomfortable to continue to read, because the thought I was gathering around and aiming to have involved… I think it involved predicting the rest of the paragraph, so that the rest of the paragraph would have a fertile place to land.
And indeed, having not created such a place, I don’t think I really know what the rest of the paragraph said.
Broadening: Third Instance
INTERESTING.
This time I felt gathering while I was reflecting on what I’d read, and not while I was reading. I broadened my focus while keeping foveal awareness on the thoughts I was having, and what resulted was… it felt an awful lot like hypnagogic cognition. It was like I was daydreaming about math.
The particular thoughts I was having were about the foundations of this system, and the implications of it being made out of individuals and truth values and functions. When I broadened my focus, things became a lot more kinesthetic and visual, and far less linear/logical. It was like the thoughts were dancing around with each other, and with the sound of the rain outside, and more things were allowed in.
I suspect that might sometimes be a really valuable move to be able to make deliberately. Daydreaming on purpose around a cruxy mathematical puzzle piece, letting in more kinds of thoughts, going halfway to sleep without losing sight of the central thoughts.
After this exercise, I felt confident that I could do pretty much whatever I wanted, on purpose, around my sense of the physical necessity of things. I declared victory and ended my study, inasmuch as such things have an end.
Experimentation (Part 7 of “The Sense Of Physical Necessity”)
This is the seventh post in a sequence that demonstrates a complete naturalist study, specifically a study of query hugging (sort of), as described in The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism. This one demos phase four: Experimentation. For context on this sequence, see the intro post. Reminder that this is meant as reference material.
Wait, there’s more to this study? But we’ve just discussed the main insight that came out of it, and how it illustrates the point of naturalism. Why is there more?
There is more because by this point I was interested not only in insights, but in mastery. There is more to mastery than reconceptualization.
However, I would like to point out that everything I’d done so far preceded experimentation. I had not even begun to try to change anything—yet I had learned quite a lot, through mere observation without interference. This is why many naturalist studies are complete before experimentation even begins. Often, this level of understanding is all that’s needed.
In this case, when I arrived at the end of Collection, I found that I wanted to know what was possible. I wanted to move freely around this chest luster, this sense of physical necessity; to explore its boundaries and the actions available to me in the presence of that experience (and its antecedents). So, I chose to continue my study.
The goal of experimentation in naturalism is to create space from alternative action.
Some beta readers felt confused during the upcoming section. They seemed to think that if I’m changing a stimulus-response pattern, it must be because I’ve recognized one as unsatisfactory, and now I hope to improve it—that something was broken, and I hope to fix it. They wanted me to describe the old broken pattern, so they could follow my changes as possible improvements.
That’s not what I’m up to here.
I’ve had trouble communicating about naturalist experimentation in the past, and I’m not sure I’ll do any better this time around. For whatever it’s worth, though, here’s my latest attempt.
*
Mary Robinette Kowal is both a fiction author and a professional puppeteer. In one of my favorite episodes of the podcast Writing Excuses, she discusses how her background in puppetry has influenced the way she writes.
She talks about four principles of puppetry, the first of which is focus: “Focus indicates thought.”
When bringing a puppet to life for an audience, it’s important to always consider what external objects the puppet is cognitively or emotionally engaged with, and to make sure its eyes are pointing at those objects. This is the audience’s primary cue about the puppet’s thoughts. If the puppet turns and points its eyes toward a bird, the audience perceives the puppet as not only looking toward that bird, but thinking about the bird as well. If you have the puppet talk about the bird while staring in a random direction, this will likely break the illusion you’re trying to build in the minds of your audience, the illusion that the puppet has a rich inner life of its own.
In fiction, Kowal uses this same trick to reveal character and motive. What a character focuses on as they look around tells us a lot about how they think: what matters to them, what they’re interested in, what it feels like to be that particular person moving through the world in that moment.
If I recall correctly, she suggests a writing exercise where you describe the same room from the perspective of three different characters. A person who’s broken into the room to steal secret documents might mainly notice a series of potential hiding places: features of a bookshelf, a tapestry covering part of the wall, a drawer with a lock. By contrast, someone who is trapped in that same room will spend much more of their attention on the door and windows.
In the early 20th century, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll was interested in how organisms perceive their environments.
Setting aside the question of phenomenal consciousness—whether there is something it is like to be a cat, or a sea urchin, or an oak tree—it’s at least evident that species with different physical sensory capacities respond to different sensory inputs.
The pothos plant on my bookcase grows toward the nearby window. As I understand it, my plant does this because its tissues contain a growth hormone that is destroyed by sunlight. The shady side of its tendrils grows longer than the sunny side, and so the tendrils bend in the direction of the light.
Uexküll would call light a part of the plant’s subjective environment, or umwelt. Light is in the plant’s umwelt not just because light is physically present around the plant, but because it is sensed by the plant.
By contrast, the adult Mexican tetra, aka “blind cavefish”, inhabits an umwelt that has nothing to do with light. Its subjective world is instead dominated by fluctuations in water pressure, which it senses through a lateral line organ—specialized epithelial cells across its body that are similar to the tiny cochlear hairs inside a human ear.
The world must seem very different to pothos plants and cave fish. Indeed, cave pools are objectively very different environments from tropical understories. But if you put a pothos in a cave, it would still behave as though trying to climb a tree (just as it’s doing on my bookshelf). It would remain sensitive to light, and would not suddenly inhabit an umwelt of fluctuating water pressure, however useful that change might be.
*
There is more to umwelt, I think, than raw sensory capacity.
A person who searches a room for secret documents does not perceive the same things as a person who is trapped in that room, even if they are both humans with identically functional sense organs. In the subjective world of the thief, the door barely exists. For the prisoner, the door is nearly all there is.
The first three phases of naturalism gradually welcome a new sensation into the student’s umwelt. They take a sensation that seems so meaningless as to be practically insensible, and turn it into a part of the subjective world to which the student responds. It is almost like giving eyes to a cave fish.
The final phase of naturalism, “experimentation”, is a deliberate exploration of the student’s new umwelt. It is the phase where they learn not only to be aware of some new feature of their world, but to respond to it deliberately, gracefully, masterfully. It is the phase where the cave fish learns to paint.
Gaining reflective awareness of a crucial sensation is often enough to accomplish whatever a student originally cared about. This proved to be the case in my study of “Hug the Query”; I was automatically performing the skills I set out to gain, just by expanding my umwelt to include “a sense of physical necessity”. Experimentation was sort of “extra credit”, with respect to my original goals.
But what I learned through experimentation set me on a path toward deep mastery of the new domain, rather than just basic competence with it.
You don’t always have to explore the space of alternative action around a fulcrum experience to achieve basic competence with it. But if you’re after extensive familiarity, accurate factional knowledge, richly detailed predictive models, and thorough practical mastery—if, gaining eyes, you suspect that you would like to paint, to succeed at a newly available range of tasks that you haven’t even thought to imagine yet—then experimentation is called for.
Experimentation was brief this time around, just a single session before I felt satisfied. I followed my standard instructions exactly: Reminding myself of the antecedents of my fulcrum experience, listing possible alternative actions, choosing one or two to try, and then trying them.
(My study of real analysis was taking a detour into type theory that day, so I did all of this while thinking about types.)
I had access to fine enough granularity by this point that I recognized four distinct periods in the moments leading up to luster, which I called “gathering”, “focusing”, “aiming”, and “releasing”. The default stimulus-response chain seemed to go gathering→focusing, focusing→aiming, aiming→releasing, releasing→ luster. My plan was to perform some sort of non-default action at any point in that chain before “luster”, and to observe what resulted.
I considered a few possible actions, and settled on two: First I would try reciting a certain stanza of poetry in response to gathering and aiming. Then I would try broadening my focus in response to gathering and aiming, which I thought might be interesting since it is sort of the opposite motion.
Why did I choose to start by reciting poetry? One correct but incomplete answer is that I like poetry and think about it often, so it was on my mind. I take nearly every opportunity to weave poetry (and other art) into the things I do, because my life is just better that way. Poetry was on my mind even more than usual at the time, because I had just finished learning “Ulalume” by Poe.
But the other reason is that poetry recitation seemed like 1) an action similar enough to the default that I’d likely have an easy time continuing to observe in the same way I’d been practicing, and 2) a fairly neutral, unrelated action whose outcome I was not at all invested in. I think it’s similar to choosing sugar tablets for a placebo control.
I recorded three instances of the “luster antecedents→poetry recitation” pattern.
The main thing I observed as a result of this intervention was a need to “re-establish partner connection” afterward. It turned out that I’d accidentally ended up in an exercise where I repeatedly recovered my sense of the physical necessity of things after having lost it. I think this is a great example of how it can be valuable to practice doing literally anything besides the default in the moments surrounding a fulcrum experience.
Happy with my first intervention, I moved to the next: In response to the antecedents of luster, I would broaden my focus, without shifting my foveal awareness.
I took a minute to practice this motion on its own, to be sure I knew what my plan was.
The vision-focused version of the movement is pretty easy to demonstrate: Pick a spot on the wall to focus on, then try to become aware of more and more of your visual field around it, letting your attentional focus broaden without moving your eyes.
My plan was to do that same broadening, but with respect to whatever my attention happened to be focusing on in the moment when I noticed any part of the gathering→focusing→aiming sequence, whether the object was in my visual field or some other perceptual field.
I again recorded three instances of the intervention.
After this exercise, I felt confident that I could do pretty much whatever I wanted, on purpose, around my sense of the physical necessity of things. I declared victory and ended my study, inasmuch as such things have an end.
(This sequence, however, is only almost over.)