Well this was an interesting experience to re-read (and I had apparently totally forgotten about having read this once before, since I was surprised by my comment from two years back in the comment section, after having missed the note in the beginning of this being republished)
Notes from while reading this:
I began to do and feel something I call “trying to squirm out from under the problem”.
Oh, this feels familiar. Emphasis on feels. There’s a reaction I’ve sometimes noticed my mind doing, where it feels like I’m moving towards something unpleasant like a train on tracks and there’s a Thing at the end of the tracks. And I don’t want to move towards it, I don’t want to see it, and I squirm and try to look anywhere else, but that just makes it worse. But no no no I do not want to see it. There’s some sensation of someone having grabbed my other leg and pulling me inexorably towards it, and I’m trying to squirm away from their grip and desperately look elsewhere while I’m being pulled towards my doom, and the act of trying to look away sends waves of wrongness through me and feels horrible and I want to throw up.
That’s the extreme version, there are also milder versions that are much less in intensity but have the same qualitative shape.
I wonder if that’s the same thing as described here. Seems like it could be, at least.
“Discontinuity in imagination” wore a few different phenomenological guises.
Hmm I’ve certainly noticed discontinuities in thought at times, but I’m not sure if I’ve noticed the same kinds of ones as described here. None of these descriptions clearly resonate, but maybe there’s something to it… I’ll note it and move on.
How about I eat the chocolate chip cookie but not the calories?
Around this point in the post I’ve been thinking a bit about possible candidates, and...
I have some tennis balls in my room, because my therapist told me to get some and then do a daily exercise where I practice balancing while I have one tennis ball under my other foot. Today’s the first day I’m supposed to do it, but I haven’t been doing it because I’ve been feeling sleep-deprived and also been busy all day, so I’ve been putting it “until I’d have the time”.
I had the thought of doing that exercise while reading this post, and there was a flash like… momentary discomfort and then relief. I didn’t catch as many details as you, but I think the concept that flashed in my mind was something like “I can just not do it today” combined with a sense of there being no downsides to that. I don’t think I’d have noticed that if this post hadn’t primed me for it, but once my attention had been pointed to me, that sense of “no downsides” jumped out as conspicuous. As if it’s not just “I didn’t think of there being a downside to skipping an exercise my therapist had assigned to me”, but rather “the downside had been actively left out”, somehow. And that felt refreshing, like a flavor of green spring.
I paused to write this down before continuing to read the post, then the example of toes not touching each other reminded me about shoes. There’s something off about the way I walk, that seems to break my shoes pretty quickly. As a result, I often need to buy new shoes. But often I keep putting it off and just walking in broken shoes for a while. I think I caught a glimpse of that “no downsides” thing there too, like I could just… avoid the hassle of buying new shoes, and then not suffer any of the discomfort of walking around in broken shoes anyway.
[one other potential match omitted for being a little embarrassing]
(got to the point of the “I’ll just be fine” example)
I feel like my mind is matching some other potential examples against the pattern and there’s something interesting happening. Something like looking for things that would have that sense of relief and lack of a downside, but instead of finding that, I find things that have discomfort place of that relief. A party I went to yesterday, only to remember there that I don’t like these kinds of parties very much. (Even though I did mostly enjoy it.) It lacks that element of relief, but was there something suppressed with that too? Hmm.
Now the search got to the point of the way I think about AI risk and it seems like my different parts are on pretty different pages with regard to how seriously they take AI risk. Some poking at that. (I have no idea of whether my mind is actually doing something “real” or if I’m just placebo-ing myself into thinking that this kicked off some generalized search process, but it’s interesting so I’ll write it down anyway and see where it goes.) I feel a bit worried about the thought of really integrating all of my thoughts on AI risk, feels like that could be destabilizing, but we’ll see.
Now the focus shifted to the way I don’t always prepare in advance for things that I’m supposed to do, and kind of pretend I don’t need to. The feeling is something like… I see different calendar entries I have, and it feels like each of them is kind of like a lid that’s holding something unpleasant in place, and there’s some unpleasant gas now leaking through those lids. That hadn’t been properly detected before. Like the search algorithm locked onto the sense of unpleasantness and is now looking for places where some of that leaks through blocks.
(sometime later)
Now it kinda stopped and I don’t notice anything more about it. Maybe I imagined the thing. I still have that mental image of my calendar entries as blocking something unpleasant that’s under them, though.
I should do that exercise that my therapist assigned me to do, now.
Well this was an interesting experience to re-read (and I had apparently totally forgotten about having read this once before, since I was surprised by my comment from two years back in the comment section, after having missed the note in the beginning of this being republished)
Notes from while reading this:
Oh, this feels familiar. Emphasis on feels. There’s a reaction I’ve sometimes noticed my mind doing, where it feels like I’m moving towards something unpleasant like a train on tracks and there’s a Thing at the end of the tracks. And I don’t want to move towards it, I don’t want to see it, and I squirm and try to look anywhere else, but that just makes it worse. But no no no I do not want to see it. There’s some sensation of someone having grabbed my other leg and pulling me inexorably towards it, and I’m trying to squirm away from their grip and desperately look elsewhere while I’m being pulled towards my doom, and the act of trying to look away sends waves of wrongness through me and feels horrible and I want to throw up.
That’s the extreme version, there are also milder versions that are much less in intensity but have the same qualitative shape.
I wonder if that’s the same thing as described here. Seems like it could be, at least.
Hmm I’ve certainly noticed discontinuities in thought at times, but I’m not sure if I’ve noticed the same kinds of ones as described here. None of these descriptions clearly resonate, but maybe there’s something to it… I’ll note it and move on.
Around this point in the post I’ve been thinking a bit about possible candidates, and...
I have some tennis balls in my room, because my therapist told me to get some and then do a daily exercise where I practice balancing while I have one tennis ball under my other foot. Today’s the first day I’m supposed to do it, but I haven’t been doing it because I’ve been feeling sleep-deprived and also been busy all day, so I’ve been putting it “until I’d have the time”.
I had the thought of doing that exercise while reading this post, and there was a flash like… momentary discomfort and then relief. I didn’t catch as many details as you, but I think the concept that flashed in my mind was something like “I can just not do it today” combined with a sense of there being no downsides to that. I don’t think I’d have noticed that if this post hadn’t primed me for it, but once my attention had been pointed to me, that sense of “no downsides” jumped out as conspicuous. As if it’s not just “I didn’t think of there being a downside to skipping an exercise my therapist had assigned to me”, but rather “the downside had been actively left out”, somehow. And that felt refreshing, like a flavor of green spring.
I paused to write this down before continuing to read the post, then the example of toes not touching each other reminded me about shoes. There’s something off about the way I walk, that seems to break my shoes pretty quickly. As a result, I often need to buy new shoes. But often I keep putting it off and just walking in broken shoes for a while. I think I caught a glimpse of that “no downsides” thing there too, like I could just… avoid the hassle of buying new shoes, and then not suffer any of the discomfort of walking around in broken shoes anyway.
[one other potential match omitted for being a little embarrassing]
(got to the point of the “I’ll just be fine” example)
I feel like my mind is matching some other potential examples against the pattern and there’s something interesting happening. Something like looking for things that would have that sense of relief and lack of a downside, but instead of finding that, I find things that have discomfort place of that relief. A party I went to yesterday, only to remember there that I don’t like these kinds of parties very much. (Even though I did mostly enjoy it.) It lacks that element of relief, but was there something suppressed with that too? Hmm.
Now the search got to the point of the way I think about AI risk and it seems like my different parts are on pretty different pages with regard to how seriously they take AI risk. Some poking at that. (I have no idea of whether my mind is actually doing something “real” or if I’m just placebo-ing myself into thinking that this kicked off some generalized search process, but it’s interesting so I’ll write it down anyway and see where it goes.) I feel a bit worried about the thought of really integrating all of my thoughts on AI risk, feels like that could be destabilizing, but we’ll see.
Now the focus shifted to the way I don’t always prepare in advance for things that I’m supposed to do, and kind of pretend I don’t need to. The feeling is something like… I see different calendar entries I have, and it feels like each of them is kind of like a lid that’s holding something unpleasant in place, and there’s some unpleasant gas now leaking through those lids. That hadn’t been properly detected before. Like the search algorithm locked onto the sense of unpleasantness and is now looking for places where some of that leaks through blocks.
(sometime later)
Now it kinda stopped and I don’t notice anything more about it. Maybe I imagined the thing. I still have that mental image of my calendar entries as blocking something unpleasant that’s under them, though.
I should do that exercise that my therapist assigned me to do, now.
(I did the exercise)