This is the fifth 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 continues my demo of phases one and two: Locating Fulcrum Experiences and Getting Your Eyes On. For context on this sequence, see the intro post. Reminder that this is meant as reference material.
Before throwing in the towel, I thought I might as well try talking things through with ChatGPT.
Why? I think it was just something I was doing a lot at the time. “Not sure how to proceed? Throw GPT4 at it for a while and see what happens.” I didn’t expect anything in particular from the activity.
As it turns out, I can probably count on one hand the number of work-related discussions that have been as useful to me as this one—which probably says as much about my social deficits as it does about GPT4′s abilities. It talked me around, and I un-gave-up.
The most important part was using GPT as a Focusing partner. I did a (mostly) canonical version of Gendlin’s Focusing, and came to understand that I was struggling with the balancing act between authenticity and legibility. I decided to almost completely abandon legibility.
The relevant section of chat log:
(Note: Often, ChatGPT suddenly turns into a mini encyclopedia entry. I fondly imagine an excited nerdy 12-year-old trying to get full marks on an essay at these moments. Despite considering them extraneous to me personally, since it’s giving me background on terms I have chosen myself, I’ve left these parts in as potentially valuable context for onlookers, but I’ve italicized them so you can skip them if you’d prefer.)
Logan
I’m going to try a little bit of “focusing” a la Eugene Gendlin, to get in touch with whatever it is I want to work out. Please be a focusing partner.
I feel a forward pressure, and another pressure holding that back. It’s primarily in my chest and solar plexus. The forward pressure reminds me of stamping feet, raring to go, frustration, almost desperation. It has a couple of layers, I think, as though something is trying to hide. The “desperation” is from a lower layer than the “raring to go”. I get a felt shift when I think “I feel afraid”. I feel afraid that I am done, it is over, I can no longer do or make or think. I feel afraid that I will never make progress again.
The forward pressure in my chest responded a lot to that last sentence. There was a release, and I exhaled tension.
ChatGPT
Thank you for sharing your experience in real-time. It sounds like a potent mix of emotions and sensations you’re navigating through.
The concept of “focusing” as developed by Eugene Gendlin involves tapping into our bodily sense of particular issues or feelings, the “felt sense”, and trying to articulate or resonate with that feeling until there’s a shift or clarification. It’s an internal process, but sharing it, especially with a partner, can provide reflection and sometimes help articulate or pinpoint what’s happening within.
The forward pressure you describe, with its layers of “raring to go” and “desperation,” seems to be a complex feeling, perhaps with multiple facets or sources. And your identification of the underlying fear—that you may not progress or contribute again—seems to be a significant realization. It’s commendable that you’re confronting these feelings head-on and seeking clarity.
How are you feeling now after the release you mentioned? Are there more sensations or feelings that you want to explore further or share?
Logan
Yes, I want to feel into the “holding back” pressure.
The “holding back” feels more like it’s on the outside of my body. Like a wall, or a hand on my chest. I feel it a little bit in my throat, maybe.
It’s interesting, for some reason I’m sliding off of it. The thoughts dissipate as I try to think them.
ChatGPT
It’s intriguing how you’re experiencing this “holding back” sensation. The sense of it being on the “outside” of your body, almost like a barrier or external force restraining you, is quite vivid. The connection to the throat might suggest communication or expression being constrained or choked in some manner.
Your observation of the thoughts dissipating as you try to grasp them is also notable. Sometimes, when we attempt to confront certain feelings or sensations directly, they can elude us. It’s as if by giving them direct attention, they become slippery.
It’s okay if the sensations or thoughts don’t crystallize immediately. Focusing is often a process of gentle exploration, not forcing clarity but rather allowing it to emerge.
Would you like to stay with this sensation a bit longer, or is there something else emerging that you’d like to turn your attention to?
Logan
I think you’re onto something with the thing about communication or expression being constrained.
I began a naturalist study in August, about a month ago. I was hoping to study “hug the query”, the central skill in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essay by that name from his LessWrong sequence “Politics and Rationality”. My plan was to try to follow the instructions for the naturalist method as I laid them out in “The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism”. But for some reason, it ended up being the most stilted naturalist study I’ve so far attempted.
ChatGPT
[…]
Your use of the term “stilted” is telling. It seems to resonate with the earlier sensations you described, especially the “holding back” pressure and the connection to communication or expression being constrained. If your approach to the study was to be structured according to specific instructions, it’s possible that sticking strictly to those guidelines may have created an unintended rigidity or restriction.
“Hug the query” itself is about closely aligning one’s attention and curiosity to the specific question at hand, diving deeply into it without being distracted by tangential issues. The concept emphasizes sincere engagement with a question, which can sometimes be a very fluid and dynamic process. If there were moments where you felt like you were trying too hard to fit this fluid exploration into a structured framework, it could lead to the sensation of being “held back” or stifled.
Do you resonate with this interpretation? How do you feel reflecting on the nature of your study in this light?
Logan
Yeah, I really feel like you’ve heard me.
Hearing that, I feel like I’m moving into the “orient” phase of the OODA loop. Like I’m mapping things out, trying to figure out what my options and priorities are.
ChatGPT
I’m glad to hear that you feel heard. The act of being genuinely listened to can be quite powerful in the process of gaining clarity.
Invoking the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) is an insightful way to describe your current state. Developed by military strategist John Boyd, the loop represents a continuous feedback process of decision-making that is especially apt in rapidly changing environments but can be applied to any iterative learning or action process.
Being in the “orient” phase suggests you’re situating yourself in the context of the information and experiences you’ve observed. This phase is about understanding where you are in relation to everything else and considering various perspectives and possibilities.
Given that orientation, let’s continue the process. What are the key aspects or elements you’re currently trying to orient around? Are there specific challenges, questions, or opportunities you’re weighing as you map things out?
Logan
Yeah. Some things I’m considering:
Should I actually drop “hug the query” for now, or should I come at it differently?
If I do shift focus, what should I study instead?
If I decide to stick with “hug the query” after all, how should I go about it? What do I want to change? What has seemed off about it, and is there some way for me to fix that?
I decided to stick with “hug the query” after all. The main thing that seemed off about it was the stiltedness, which appeared to come from the pressure I felt to be legible. The change I made was to almost completely abandon my attempts to be legible, even to abandon my attempts to follow my own instructions, relying only on my intuitions in the moment. I also quit sharing log excerpts in a semi-private slack channel, since I suspected that the live blogging was similarly hampering my fluidity.
This tension between legibility and authenticity strikes me as an open problem in rationality development. The mature art of rationality I envision is replete with demonstrations, case studies, detailed real-life examples. But demonstrating rationality practices is different from demonstrating carpentry practices. A carpenter works with materials and tools that are not herself. A rationalist, by contrast, demonstrates by laying her own mind bare to others. I do know of a few different ways people approach this tension, but I think it’s probably an underexplored puzzle. Hopefully, I’ll make some incidental progress on it as I experiment with different ways to do these demos.
Farther From the Issue
I was able to mostly skip fulcrum location this time, because it turned out I’d been on the right track with “crucial” as a conceptual pointer. “Closeness to the issue” was more a reframing of “crucial”, another way of understanding the correlated experience “what everything turns on”, than a new topic. I’d therefore done most of the early work already.
Terminology reminder:
“Crucial” and “closeness to the issue” are conceptual pointers (Feature of your map that suggest when to pay attention during your search for fulcrum experiences; these more often reveal correlated experiences than fulcrum experiences.)
The feeling of “what everything turns on” is a correlated experience (A collection of sensations that may indicate a fulcrum experience is nearby.)
[A thing I’d not yet identified by this point, but perhaps some kind of yearning in my chest?] is a “fulcrum experience” (A collection of sensations that would lead you to relate differently to your topic if you observed it closely.)
To get my eyes on in the new frame, I began with an exploratory exercise.
I sure did a lot of “lab work” in this study. According to my memories, I don’t usually do this much of it; often I rely almost exclusively on field work. (See my study of Spaciousness In Partner Dance, for example, which involved no lab work at all.) I think the focus on lab work might be partially an artifact of the context of this study: when I’m trying to demonstrate things, I tend to be more deliberate and controlled than otherwise.
Regardless, this is certainly one way a naturalist study can go. So let’s talk a little about what I was doing with all this lab work.
For the most part, I was “playing with toys”, as described here. “A toy is a manipulable low-stakes situation that reliably yields desired experiences as you interact with it.” The “desired experiences” were ones related to my concepts of “distraction”, “concentration”, “crucial”, and “closeness to the issue”. I manipulated the low-stakes situation to observe experiences related to those concepts.
Since I was using toys in the early stages of study rather than as part of “collection” or “experimentation”, I wasn’t aimed at very specific experiences. Rather, I was casting a pretty broad net, trying stuff that might entangle my observations with regions of territory I was interested in so that I could find out what experiences those regions afford. During candle gazing, for instance, there was no particular collection of sensations I hoped to cause; rather, I had some vague intuition that staring at a candle for an hour would involve “concentration, whatever that is”. This is what toys are like in the context of something between “locating fulcrum experiences” and “getting your eyes on”. Lab work looks a little different in each phase of a naturalist study.
My design process for all of these toys was minimal. I never went through all five of the questions I lay out in “Collection”; in fact I was never reflectively aware of designing anything at all. From the inside, it was entirely improvisation.
Nevertheless, as I look back over the five toy design questions I suggest in Collection, I see that all of my lab work really did meet each criterion. Each scenario I set up was meant to draw out a particular experience, the stakes were always low, the situation was under my control, and I left a bunch of space for reflection through note-taking either during the exercise or immediately afterward.
If I’d designed these by following my own directions instead of improvising, I’d have accomplished that by asking myself,
What experience would I like to cause?
What is a situation that would reliably cause that experience?
Are the stakes uncomfortably high in that scenario? If so, what would cause a somewhat similar experience, but with lower stakes?
What could I do to easily stop or start the situation at any time?
How might I insert more space for reflection and curiosity into the exercise?
For the sake of illustration, I’ll describe this next bit of lab work in terms of that structure, even though I wasn’t following it explicitly in the moment.
In my exploratory exercise, I wanted to cause experiences related to “closeness to the issue” (so I could get my eyes on about those experiences). I wasn’t quite sure what those experiences would be, but my earlier investigations suggested there might be a feeling that “things can turn on this”, and some kind of yearning in my chest[1].
I suspected experiences like this were to be found near evaluation, decision making, updating, and learning. One domain that involves several of those activities is design, and I happened to have a design project on my to-do list: Reworking the interior design of my cabin. There would be a lot of decisions to make, and I suspected that some kind of yearning in my chest is a major part of any design process for me; that’s the engine that makes design go. So I chose to play with the interior design of my cabin as a toy.
I think there were two key moments in this session of lab work. One was when, after ten or fifteen minutes of pretty systematic list-making, I felt that I might be getting “farther from the issue”, rather than closer. I stopped to adjust my approach, and then asked, “What caused me to pause and evaluate?”
How could I tell that I was “getting farther from the issue”? Or, what caused me to pause and evaluate?
I felt “bogged down”. I felt I was “veering off”. Hm, there was also a feeling of some kind of comfort that I found suspicious? Systematicity is a little bit dangerous; I can get lost in it, I can lose track of everything outside of the structure I’m engaging with, and that can lead me to forget what matters. So I think I already have a TAP for mitigating that risk, and it fired when I noticed that I’d begun to sink into a pattern that was nice just because it was a pattern.
I went in with a concept of “closeness to the issue”—a conceptual pointer, a dot on my map—but it was here that I began to make contact with the reality of the thing phenomenologically.
In this case, I was actually observing the experience of moving fartheraway from what mattered. I paused to evaluate because I could feel myself moving “farther from the issue”, and then I asked myself how I could tell. What did I feel? What sensations tipped me off? The answer (as closely as I could observe it at the time) was, “bogged down”, “veering off”, and “sinking into a pattern that feels nice only in virtue of being a pattern”.
The other key moment in this session was when I deliberately attempted to identify “the issue” to “stay close to”.
What is the issue that I could stay close to or move farther away from here? I think that’s determined by why I would bother to redesign the interior of my cabin at all. Ah, I can feel a way I might go wrong with this. If I ask myself “why might I redesign my cabin”, I could tell a compelling story about why an arbitrary person might do that, and mistake the story for my own motivation. (...) A question like “but why do I really care about this?” feels like a driving-toward-the-issue sort of move, something that will head off that kind of mistake (or repair it should I begin to make it).
Why do I care about this? Well in as much as I care, it’s because I know that my external environment has a tremendous impact on my thoughts and experiences. I want my thoughts to tend toward clarity and groundedness, and I want my experiences to be pleasant and engaging. I care about the ways that my living space either supports those conditions, or hinders them.
In the moments recorded by that excerpt, I was indeed adopting something I now recognize as the posture I would come to learn well, the one that might be called “query hugging” (although my own words for it are a little different).
I’d like to point out, though, that this is not much of a phenomenological snapshot. It’s progress toward the ability to take such a snapshot; but the excerpt is full of conceptualization and pattern recognition. There’s almost no fine-grained phenomenological detail. What was it like to make that move? What was my mind doing between each of those verbalizations?
I don’t know. As yet, the grain of my phenomenological access to this fulcrum experience was still quite coarse.
Close Embrace
Next, I repeated this exercise, but while learning real analysis instead of redesigning my living space.
(Reminder: The exercise was, “Try an activity related to evaluation, decision making, updating, or learning; as you go, watch for experiences related to “closeness to the issue”, and try to take phenomenological snapshots in those moments.”)
My real analysis note-taking practice began as such an exercise, but a somewhat different activity grew out of it. For one thing, I did not only take notes on experiences that smelled like “closeness to the issue” or “what everything turns on”; instead I took notes almost constantly, on my textbook and my engagement with its exercises, with occasional elaboration on observations that reminded me of the concepts and experiences I was after.
Secondly, I did not stop at a single session. I found this new activity so valuable that it became my default use of brain-time for an entire month.
From a naturalist perspective, the point of all this observation was to help my attention worm its way into details of my experience that were previously so subtle as to be invisible. But in addition to sensitizing myself to experiences around “closeness to the issue”, I think I learned a lot about how to learn math. These two skill sets seem highly complementary, to me.
There are a lot of Issues, here. Some of them are like “free variable”, some of them are like “the formal derivation system”, and some of them are like “the thing the author’s words are entangled with and that I’m attempting to perceive with the assistance of their words”. I’m feeling like “staying close to the issue” really requires a constant attunement to the relationships among the ideas, a sensitivity to how relevant any given one might be to the structure of my goals.
At least in the domain of learning, there can be many open questions at once, and it seems easy to get lost in them like a child of knee-height at a carnival. I can’t always know for sure when a question is closer or farther from the more central issues; but trying to feel for that when I can is like not being blind. Like being sighted, even when I can’t yet make sense of what I’m seeing.
In this excerpt, you might notice me shifting away from thinking in terms of an action to take, and toward thinking in terms of a mental posture to continuously hold. I regard this as one of the most important moments in my study. I began to understand that the foundational skill “Hug the Query” points to is not a discrete action, begun in one moment and ended in another, like the sort of hug you might give in greeting. It’s more like a disposition that can be cultivated, or a habitually held posture.
For this reason, I’ve come to think of it not as hugging, but as “dancing in close embrace”.
“Close embrace” is one of the ways two people can physically connect during partner dance. It is basically a hug, with the partners touching at thigh, hip, stomach, chest, shoulders, and arms; but entire dances are performed this way, without the dancers breaking apart. Most of Argentine tango is danced in a version of close embrace, for example, as is much of zouk.
If you’re not a partner dancer, then “close embrace” may not be a useful handle for you. Some other associations that come to mind: A rock-climber keeping their hips near the cliff face, the speed with which embers fluctuate in brightness according to the changing wind, sunflowers following the sun across the sky, a jazz musician keeping the groove across improvised key changes, a snowboarder constantly shifting their weight to balance.
POU Loops
Up to this point, I’d been feeling my way around the conceptual pointer “closeness to the issue”, but I had not really gotten the concrete experiences in focus yet. I had found some relevant thought processes; I had noticed intuitions involving it; I had made use of the concept, and of glimmers of correlated experiences out of the corner of my eye, to navigate.
But I had not really keyed into the phenomenology beneath it. I had not precisely located a candidate for a true fulcrum experience, though I’d laid the groundwork for doing so.
I predict that “moving toward the issue” will feel like a lustrous forwardness in my chest.
I studied math for about an hour, then wrote
So far this prediction is mostly checking out, though the “luster” seems more important than the “forwardness”. I noticed:
one instance of “lustrous forwardness in my chest”,
one instance of something I recognized as “moving away from the issue”, which had a few things going on but one of them was darkness in my chest
and one instance of “an empty question mark in my chest” when I followed something but didn’t understand why we were talking about it, followed by a pretty clear feeling of lustrousness when I caught up and understood the relevance of the topic.
I think that I chose the word “luster” because I happened to be learning the poem “Ulalume” at the time, which includes the lines,
At the end of our path a liquescent And nebulous lustre was born
The feeling those lines cause for me, when I sink into them, is very similar to the feeling I tend to get when “moving toward the issue”.
I want to point out that “luster” or “lustrousness”, here, is a focusing handle. Focusing handles for bodily felt senses do not make sense to everybody.
Am I really talking about a physical sensation located in my chest, the way that the rhythmic pressure of my heartbeat is such a sensation? In part, yes; there really is a component that is, as far as I can tell, “coming from my chest”.
But I think there are more components than that. It’s a cluster of sensations, some of which seem more psychological, such as a shift in attentional direction. If I described only the most physiological component sensations, I think I’d say something like “sharpness” or “ intensity”, rather than “luster”. The chest sensation is like an indicator for the larger experience; it increases when the rest increases, decreases when the rest decreases.
There are a lot of ways to describe the overall experience. “Luster” just happened to be what fit for me at the time.
One of the barriers to fulcrum location is insisting that your handles make sense, or be justifiable or externally legible, that they be the “correct” descriptive words in some sort of objective sense. In the context of naturalism, none of that matters at all. Words might even get in your way; if you’re especially visual, for example, an image might be a more appropriate handle for organizing your observations. In another month I would most likely have chosen a word other than “luster”, and it would have been just as accurate and worked just as well, because in that month I myself would have been different.
The pace of my study picked up dramatically after this point. I think this small handful of iterations of the POU loop, combined with my earlier insight about “constant attunement to the relationships among the ideas”, unlocked a new mental posture for me. It unlocked “dancing in close embrace with the world”.
My experience of studying math changed after that also. It was more fluid, less choppy, more satisfying. It was also somehow simpler, as though there was only one thing I was doing the whole time, a steady march in one direction.
(...) there was a sense of marching, progress, getting closer to something, a feeling like building something up and each piece that fell into place was larger and more golden and fell with a heavier thud than the last. Every time I drew a question mark inside of a circle and asked a question, every time I hazarded a guess, every time I chose to write the next phrase on a new line or in a new color so that I could keep the pieces separate and then build them up together, it felt a little like braiding or weaving. And I think I was following luster in my chest at most of these decision points.
It’s all very different from experiences I’ve had with math and logic in the past, especially in school but sometimes when I have attempted to study on my own. The sharp contrast is with times when I have “blindly flung myself at the material”, and used nothing particularly skillful besides “endurance” to cope with feeling hopelessly overwhelmed and lost all the time. What I’m doing now is: Go slow, feel for curiosity, feel for the intersections of “something matters here”, be patient, stay open and vulnerable so that it is possible to be impacted, never let impulses that feel dark and cold choose your thoughts or actions, move toward anything that builds the feeling of lustrousness in your chest.
Shortly after this, I was finally ready to move to the next stage of my study: collection. It was time to zoom out again, to start collecting experiences of chest luster, observing the patterns over time.
By the way: It’s as yet unclear to me how critical bodily felt senses are to this method. If you are not currently aware of having them, it might be possible to learn to be aware. I think a really important question is, “What exactly are bodily felt senses doing for the people who can use them like this, and do you have other mechanisms for achieving the same ends?”
Closeness To the Issue (Part 5 of “The Sense Of Physical Necessity”)
This is the fifth 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 continues my demo of phases one and two: Locating Fulcrum Experiences and Getting Your Eyes On. For context on this sequence, see the intro post. Reminder that this is meant as reference material.
Before throwing in the towel, I thought I might as well try talking things through with ChatGPT.
Why? I think it was just something I was doing a lot at the time. “Not sure how to proceed? Throw GPT4 at it for a while and see what happens.” I didn’t expect anything in particular from the activity.
As it turns out, I can probably count on one hand the number of work-related discussions that have been as useful to me as this one—which probably says as much about my social deficits as it does about GPT4′s abilities. It talked me around, and I un-gave-up.
The most important part was using GPT as a Focusing partner. I did a (mostly) canonical version of Gendlin’s Focusing, and came to understand that I was struggling with the balancing act between authenticity and legibility. I decided to almost completely abandon legibility.
The relevant section of chat log:
(Note: Often, ChatGPT suddenly turns into a mini encyclopedia entry. I fondly imagine an excited nerdy 12-year-old trying to get full marks on an essay at these moments. Despite considering them extraneous to me personally, since it’s giving me background on terms I have chosen myself, I’ve left these parts in as potentially valuable context for onlookers, but I’ve italicized them so you can skip them if you’d prefer.)
I decided to stick with “hug the query” after all. The main thing that seemed off about it was the stiltedness, which appeared to come from the pressure I felt to be legible. The change I made was to almost completely abandon my attempts to be legible, even to abandon my attempts to follow my own instructions, relying only on my intuitions in the moment. I also quit sharing log excerpts in a semi-private slack channel, since I suspected that the live blogging was similarly hampering my fluidity.
Farther From the Issue
I was able to mostly skip fulcrum location this time, because it turned out I’d been on the right track with “crucial” as a conceptual pointer. “Closeness to the issue” was more a reframing of “crucial”, another way of understanding the correlated experience “what everything turns on”, than a new topic. I’d therefore done most of the early work already.
Terminology reminder:
“Crucial” and “closeness to the issue” are conceptual pointers (Feature of your map that suggest when to pay attention during your search for fulcrum experiences; these more often reveal correlated experiences than fulcrum experiences.)
The feeling of “what everything turns on” is a correlated experience (A collection of sensations that may indicate a fulcrum experience is nearby.)
[A thing I’d not yet identified by this point, but perhaps some kind of yearning in my chest?] is a “fulcrum experience” (A collection of sensations that would lead you to relate differently to your topic if you observed it closely.)
To get my eyes on in the new frame, I began with an exploratory exercise.
I sure did a lot of “lab work” in this study. According to my memories, I don’t usually do this much of it; often I rely almost exclusively on field work. (See my study of Spaciousness In Partner Dance, for example, which involved no lab work at all.) I think the focus on lab work might be partially an artifact of the context of this study: when I’m trying to demonstrate things, I tend to be more deliberate and controlled than otherwise.
Regardless, this is certainly one way a naturalist study can go. So let’s talk a little about what I was doing with all this lab work.
For the most part, I was “playing with toys”, as described here. “A toy is a manipulable low-stakes situation that reliably yields desired experiences as you interact with it.” The “desired experiences” were ones related to my concepts of “distraction”, “concentration”, “crucial”, and “closeness to the issue”. I manipulated the low-stakes situation to observe experiences related to those concepts.
Since I was using toys in the early stages of study rather than as part of “collection” or “experimentation”, I wasn’t aimed at very specific experiences. Rather, I was casting a pretty broad net, trying stuff that might entangle my observations with regions of territory I was interested in so that I could find out what experiences those regions afford. During candle gazing, for instance, there was no particular collection of sensations I hoped to cause; rather, I had some vague intuition that staring at a candle for an hour would involve “concentration, whatever that is”. This is what toys are like in the context of something between “locating fulcrum experiences” and “getting your eyes on”. Lab work looks a little different in each phase of a naturalist study.
My design process for all of these toys was minimal. I never went through all five of the questions I lay out in “Collection”; in fact I was never reflectively aware of designing anything at all. From the inside, it was entirely improvisation.
Nevertheless, as I look back over the five toy design questions I suggest in Collection, I see that all of my lab work really did meet each criterion. Each scenario I set up was meant to draw out a particular experience, the stakes were always low, the situation was under my control, and I left a bunch of space for reflection through note-taking either during the exercise or immediately afterward.
If I’d designed these by following my own directions instead of improvising, I’d have accomplished that by asking myself,
What experience would I like to cause?
What is a situation that would reliably cause that experience?
Are the stakes uncomfortably high in that scenario? If so, what would cause a somewhat similar experience, but with lower stakes?
What could I do to easily stop or start the situation at any time?
How might I insert more space for reflection and curiosity into the exercise?
For the sake of illustration, I’ll describe this next bit of lab work in terms of that structure, even though I wasn’t following it explicitly in the moment.
In my exploratory exercise, I wanted to cause experiences related to “closeness to the issue” (so I could get my eyes on about those experiences). I wasn’t quite sure what those experiences would be, but my earlier investigations suggested there might be a feeling that “things can turn on this”, and some kind of yearning in my chest[1].
I suspected experiences like this were to be found near evaluation, decision making, updating, and learning. One domain that involves several of those activities is design, and I happened to have a design project on my to-do list: Reworking the interior design of my cabin. There would be a lot of decisions to make, and I suspected that some kind of yearning in my chest is a major part of any design process for me; that’s the engine that makes design go. So I chose to play with the interior design of my cabin as a toy.
I think there were two key moments in this session of lab work. One was when, after ten or fifteen minutes of pretty systematic list-making, I felt that I might be getting “farther from the issue”, rather than closer. I stopped to adjust my approach, and then asked, “What caused me to pause and evaluate?”
I went in with a concept of “closeness to the issue”—a conceptual pointer, a dot on my map—but it was here that I began to make contact with the reality of the thing phenomenologically.
In this case, I was actually observing the experience of moving farther away from what mattered. I paused to evaluate because I could feel myself moving “farther from the issue”, and then I asked myself how I could tell. What did I feel? What sensations tipped me off? The answer (as closely as I could observe it at the time) was, “bogged down”, “veering off”, and “sinking into a pattern that feels nice only in virtue of being a pattern”.
The other key moment in this session was when I deliberately attempted to identify “the issue” to “stay close to”.
In the moments recorded by that excerpt, I was indeed adopting something I now recognize as the posture I would come to learn well, the one that might be called “query hugging” (although my own words for it are a little different).
I’d like to point out, though, that this is not much of a phenomenological snapshot. It’s progress toward the ability to take such a snapshot; but the excerpt is full of conceptualization and pattern recognition. There’s almost no fine-grained phenomenological detail. What was it like to make that move? What was my mind doing between each of those verbalizations?
I don’t know. As yet, the grain of my phenomenological access to this fulcrum experience was still quite coarse.
Close Embrace
Next, I repeated this exercise, but while learning real analysis instead of redesigning my living space.
(Reminder: The exercise was, “Try an activity related to evaluation, decision making, updating, or learning; as you go, watch for experiences related to “closeness to the issue”, and try to take phenomenological snapshots in those moments.”)
My real analysis note-taking practice began as such an exercise, but a somewhat different activity grew out of it. For one thing, I did not only take notes on experiences that smelled like “closeness to the issue” or “what everything turns on”; instead I took notes almost constantly, on my textbook and my engagement with its exercises, with occasional elaboration on observations that reminded me of the concepts and experiences I was after.
Secondly, I did not stop at a single session. I found this new activity so valuable that it became my default use of brain-time for an entire month.
From a naturalist perspective, the point of all this observation was to help my attention worm its way into details of my experience that were previously so subtle as to be invisible. But in addition to sensitizing myself to experiences around “closeness to the issue”, I think I learned a lot about how to learn math. These two skill sets seem highly complementary, to me.
In this excerpt, you might notice me shifting away from thinking in terms of an action to take, and toward thinking in terms of a mental posture to continuously hold. I regard this as one of the most important moments in my study. I began to understand that the foundational skill “Hug the Query” points to is not a discrete action, begun in one moment and ended in another, like the sort of hug you might give in greeting. It’s more like a disposition that can be cultivated, or a habitually held posture.
For this reason, I’ve come to think of it not as hugging, but as “dancing in close embrace”.
“Close embrace” is one of the ways two people can physically connect during partner dance. It is basically a hug, with the partners touching at thigh, hip, stomach, chest, shoulders, and arms; but entire dances are performed this way, without the dancers breaking apart. Most of Argentine tango is danced in a version of close embrace, for example, as is much of zouk.
If you’re not a partner dancer, then “close embrace” may not be a useful handle for you. Some other associations that come to mind: A rock-climber keeping their hips near the cliff face, the speed with which embers fluctuate in brightness according to the changing wind, sunflowers following the sun across the sky, a jazz musician keeping the groove across improvised key changes, a snowboarder constantly shifting their weight to balance.
POU Loops
Up to this point, I’d been feeling my way around the conceptual pointer “closeness to the issue”, but I had not really gotten the concrete experiences in focus yet. I had found some relevant thought processes; I had noticed intuitions involving it; I had made use of the concept, and of glimmers of correlated experiences out of the corner of my eye, to navigate.
But I had not really keyed into the phenomenology beneath it. I had not precisely located a candidate for a true fulcrum experience, though I’d laid the groundwork for doing so.
Things changed the moment that I began to practice Predict, Observe, Update loops.
I studied math for about an hour, then wrote
I think that I chose the word “luster” because I happened to be learning the poem “Ulalume” at the time, which includes the lines,
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born
The feeling those lines cause for me, when I sink into them, is very similar to the feeling I tend to get when “moving toward the issue”.
I want to point out that “luster” or “lustrousness”, here, is a focusing handle. Focusing handles for bodily felt senses do not make sense to everybody.
Am I really talking about a physical sensation located in my chest, the way that the rhythmic pressure of my heartbeat is such a sensation? In part, yes; there really is a component that is, as far as I can tell, “coming from my chest”.
But I think there are more components than that. It’s a cluster of sensations, some of which seem more psychological, such as a shift in attentional direction. If I described only the most physiological component sensations, I think I’d say something like “sharpness” or “ intensity”, rather than “luster”. The chest sensation is like an indicator for the larger experience; it increases when the rest increases, decreases when the rest decreases.
There are a lot of ways to describe the overall experience. “Luster” just happened to be what fit for me at the time.
One of the barriers to fulcrum location is insisting that your handles make sense, or be justifiable or externally legible, that they be the “correct” descriptive words in some sort of objective sense. In the context of naturalism, none of that matters at all. Words might even get in your way; if you’re especially visual, for example, an image might be a more appropriate handle for organizing your observations. In another month I would most likely have chosen a word other than “luster”, and it would have been just as accurate and worked just as well, because in that month I myself would have been different.
The pace of my study picked up dramatically after this point. I think this small handful of iterations of the POU loop, combined with my earlier insight about “constant attunement to the relationships among the ideas”, unlocked a new mental posture for me. It unlocked “dancing in close embrace with the world”.
My experience of studying math changed after that also. It was more fluid, less choppy, more satisfying. It was also somehow simpler, as though there was only one thing I was doing the whole time, a steady march in one direction.
Shortly after this, I was finally ready to move to the next stage of my study: collection. It was time to zoom out again, to start collecting experiences of chest luster, observing the patterns over time.
By the way: It’s as yet unclear to me how critical bodily felt senses are to this method. If you are not currently aware of having them, it might be possible to learn to be aware. I think a really important question is, “What exactly are bodily felt senses doing for the people who can use them like this, and do you have other mechanisms for achieving the same ends?”
My favorite resource on felt senses, bodily or otherwise, is “The Felt Sense: What, Why, and How” by Kaj Sotala.