But on a set of very reasonable priors, we would expect your most meaningful and spiritually significant head-moment to be correlated with and causally linked to some kind of unusual thing happening outside your head. An activity, an interaction with other people, a novel observation.
This doesn’t feel plausible at all to me. (This is one of two key places where I disagree with your framing)
Like, this is a huge category: “experiences that don’t involve anything unusual happening around you.” It includes virtually all of the thinking we do—especially the kind of thinking that demands concentration. For most (all?) of us, it includes moments of immense terror and immense joy. Fiction writers commonly spend many hours in this state, “just sitting there” and having ideas and figuring out how they fit together, before they ever commit a single word of those ideas to (digital) paper. The same goes for artists of many other kinds. This is where theorems are proven, where we confront our hidden shames and overcome them, (often) where we first realize that we love someone, or that we don’t love someone, or . . .
The other place where I disagree with your framing: it seems like you are modeling human minds at a kind of coarse resolution, where people have mostly-coherent beliefs, with a single global “map” or world model that all the beliefs refer to, and the beliefs have already been (at least approximately) “updated” to reflect all the person’s actual experiences, etc.
That coarse-grained model is often helpful, but in this case, I think things make more sense if you “zoom in” and model human minds as very complicated bundles of heuristics, trying to solve a computationally expensive problem in real time, with lots of different topic-specific maps that sometimes conflict, and a lot of reliance on simplifying assumptions that we don’t always realize we’re making.
And indeed, this is much of why (just) thinking can be so interesting and meaningful: it gives us the ability to process information slower than realtime, digesting it with less aggressive reliance on cheap heuristics. We “turn things over in our heads,” disabling/re-enabling different heuristics, flipping through our different maps, etc.
I think a part of what psychedelics do is to produce a more intense version of “turning things over in one’s head,” disabling some of the more-ingrained heuristics that you usually forget about, getting you to apply a style of thinking X to a topic Y when you’d always normally think of Y in style Z, changing which things you mentally bin together vs. split apart. This can yield real insights that are outside of your normal “search space,” but even if not, it exposes you to a lot of potential ways of looking at things that you can use later if you deem them valuable.
(I have used psychedelics a number of times, and I have the impression that some of this use led to personal growth, although it might have been growth that would have occurred soon anyway. I did find these experiences “meaningful,” mostly in a way unrelated to “having breakthroughs” or “learning/realizing things” during the experience—more to do with the cognitive/emotional presentation-of-new-possibilities I described in the previous paragraph. And for the “art-like” aspect of the experience, the way I’d call a moving work of fiction or music “meaningful to me.”)
I just can’t get past what reads to me as tremendous typical mind fallacy in this comment?
Like, I think I would just straightforwardly agree with you, if you had caveatted that you were talking about LWers exclusively, or something similar.
But the whole thing above seems to think it’s not about, I dunno, a normal curve of people centered on IQ 125 or something.
So much of what you’re arguing falls apart once you look at the set of humans instead of the set of [fiction writers + artists + theorem provers + introspecters + people who do any kind of deliberate or active thinking at all on the regular].
As for the second bit: I’m not modeling human minds as having mostly-coherent beliefs or a single global map.
This doesn’t feel plausible at all to me. (This is one of two key places where I disagree with your framing)
Like, this is a huge category: “experiences that don’t involve anything unusual happening around you.” It includes virtually all of the thinking we do—especially the kind of thinking that demands concentration. For most (all?) of us, it includes moments of immense terror and immense joy. Fiction writers commonly spend many hours in this state, “just sitting there” and having ideas and figuring out how they fit together, before they ever commit a single word of those ideas to (digital) paper. The same goes for artists of many other kinds. This is where theorems are proven, where we confront our hidden shames and overcome them, (often) where we first realize that we love someone, or that we don’t love someone, or . . .
The other place where I disagree with your framing: it seems like you are modeling human minds at a kind of coarse resolution, where people have mostly-coherent beliefs, with a single global “map” or world model that all the beliefs refer to, and the beliefs have already been (at least approximately) “updated” to reflect all the person’s actual experiences, etc.
That coarse-grained model is often helpful, but in this case, I think things make more sense if you “zoom in” and model human minds as very complicated bundles of heuristics, trying to solve a computationally expensive problem in real time, with lots of different topic-specific maps that sometimes conflict, and a lot of reliance on simplifying assumptions that we don’t always realize we’re making.
And indeed, this is much of why (just) thinking can be so interesting and meaningful: it gives us the ability to process information slower than realtime, digesting it with less aggressive reliance on cheap heuristics. We “turn things over in our heads,” disabling/re-enabling different heuristics, flipping through our different maps, etc.
I think a part of what psychedelics do is to produce a more intense version of “turning things over in one’s head,” disabling some of the more-ingrained heuristics that you usually forget about, getting you to apply a style of thinking X to a topic Y when you’d always normally think of Y in style Z, changing which things you mentally bin together vs. split apart. This can yield real insights that are outside of your normal “search space,” but even if not, it exposes you to a lot of potential ways of looking at things that you can use later if you deem them valuable.
(I have used psychedelics a number of times, and I have the impression that some of this use led to personal growth, although it might have been growth that would have occurred soon anyway. I did find these experiences “meaningful,” mostly in a way unrelated to “having breakthroughs” or “learning/realizing things” during the experience—more to do with the cognitive/emotional presentation-of-new-possibilities I described in the previous paragraph. And for the “art-like” aspect of the experience, the way I’d call a moving work of fiction or music “meaningful to me.”)
I just can’t get past what reads to me as tremendous typical mind fallacy in this comment?
Like, I think I would just straightforwardly agree with you, if you had caveatted that you were talking about LWers exclusively, or something similar.
But the whole thing above seems to think it’s not about, I dunno, a normal curve of people centered on IQ 125 or something.
So much of what you’re arguing falls apart once you look at the set of humans instead of the set of [fiction writers + artists + theorem provers + introspecters + people who do any kind of deliberate or active thinking at all on the regular].
As for the second bit: I’m not modeling human minds as having mostly-coherent beliefs or a single global map.