Actually, system one can handle a surprising amount of abstraction; I don’t have one handy, but any comprehensive description of conceptual synesthesia should do a good job of explaining it.
I’d certainly be interested in that. My own definitions are aimed at teaching people not to abstract away from experience, including emotional experience. Certainly there is some abstraction at that level, it’s just a different kind of abstraction (ISTM) than system 2 abstraction.
In particular, what I’m calilng system 1 does not generally use complex sentence structure or long utterances, and the referents of its “sentences” are almost always concrete nouns, with its principal abstractions being emotional labels rather than conceptual ones.
The fact that I can literally see that the concept ‘deserve X’ depends on the emotional version of the concept ‘should do X’, because the pattern for one contains the pattern for the other, makes it very clear to me that such abstractions are not dependent on the rational processing system.
I consider “should X” and “deserve X” to both be emotional labels, since they code for attitude and action towards X, and so both are well within system 1 scope. When used by system 2, they may carry totally different connotations, and have nothing to do with what the speaker actually believes they deserve or should do, and especially little to do with what they’ll actually do.
For example, a statement like, “People should respect the rights of others and let them have what they deserve” is absolutely System 2, whereas, a statement like “I don’t deserve it” (especially if experienced emotionally) is well within System 1 territory.
It’s entirely possible that my definition of system 1⁄2 is more than a little out of whack with yours or the original S&W definition, but under my definition it’s pretty easy to learn to distinguish S1 utterances from S2 utterances, at least within the context of mind hacking, where I or someone else is trying to find out what’s really going on in System 1 in relation to a topic, and distinguish it from System 2′s confabulated theories.
However, since you claim to be able to observe system 1 directly, this would seem to put you in a privileged position with respect to changing yourself—in principle you should be able to observe what beliefs create any undesired behaviors or emotional responses. Since that’s the hard part of mind hacking IME, I’m a bit surprised you haven’t done more with the “easy” part (i.e. changing the contents of System 1).
In particular, what I’m calilng system 1 does not generally use complex sentence structure or long utterances, and the referents of its “sentences” are almost always concrete nouns, with its principal abstractions being emotional labels rather than conceptual ones.
Yep, it mostly uses nouns, simple verbs, relatedness catgegorizations (‘because’) , behavior categorizations (‘should’, ‘avoid with this degree of priority’), and a few semi-abstract concepts like ‘this week’. Surprisingly, I don’t often ‘see’ the concepts of good or bad—they seem to be more built-in to certain nouns and verbs, and changing my opinion of a thing causes it to ‘look’ completely different. (That’s also not the only thing that can cause a concept to change appearance—one of my closest friends has mellowed from a very nervous shade of orange to a wonderfully centered and calm medium-dark chocolate color over the course of the last year or so.)
I consider “should X” and “deserve X” to both be emotional labels, since they code for attitude and action towards X, and so both are well within system 1 scope. When used by system 2, they may carry totally different connotations, and have nothing to do with what the speaker actually believes they deserve or should do, and especially little to do with what they’ll actually do.
For example, a statement like, “People should respect the rights of others and let them have what they deserve” is absolutely System 2, whereas, a statement like “I don’t deserve it” (especially if experienced emotionally) is well within System 1 territory.
Hmm… heh, it actually sounds like I just don’t use system 2, then.
However, since you claim to be able to observe system 1 directly, this would seem to put you in a privileged position with respect to changing yourself—in principle you should be able to observe what beliefs create any undesired behaviors or emotional responses. Since that’s the hard part of mind hacking IME, I’m a bit surprised you haven’t done more with the “easy” part (i.e. changing the contents of System 1).
I have and do, actually, and there’s very little that’s ‘undesirable’ left in there that I’m aware of (an irrational but so far not problematic fear of teenagers and a rationally-based but problematic fear of mental health professionals and, by extension, doctors are the only two things that come to mind that I’d change, and I’ve already done significant work on the second or I wouldn’t be able to calmly have this conversation with you). The major limitation is that I can only see what’s at hand, and it takes a degree of concentration to do so. I can’t detangle my thought process directly while I’m trying to carry on a conversation, unless it’s directly related to exactly what I’m doing at the moment, and I can’t fix problems that I haven’t noticed or have forgotten about.
I’m going to be putting together a simple display on conceptual synesthesia for my Neuroversity project this week… I’ll be sure to send you a link when it’s done.
I’ve been thinking more about this… or, not really. One of the downsides to my particular mind-setup is that it takes a long time to retrieve things from long-term memory, but I did retrieve something interesting just now.
When I was younger, I think I did use system two moderately regularly. I do vaguely remember intentionally trying to ‘figure things out’ using non-synesthetic reasoning—before I realized that the synesthesia was both real and useful—and coming to conclusions. I very distinctly remember having a mindset more than once of “I made this decision, so this is what I’m going to do, whether it makes sense now or not”. I also remember that I was unable to retain the logic behind those decisions, which made me very inflexible about them—I couldn’t use new data to update my decision, because I didn’t know how I’d come to the conclusion or how the new data should fit in. Using that system is demanding enough that it simply wasn’t possible to re-do my logic every single time a potentially-relevant piece of data turned up, and in fact I couldn’t remember enough of my reasoning to even figure out which pieces of data were likely to be relevant. The resulting single-mindedness is much less useful than the ability to actually be flexible about your actions, and after having that forcibly pointed out by reality a few times, I stopped using that method altogether.
There does seem to be a degree of epistemic hygiene necessary to switch entirely to using system one, though. I do remember, vaguely, that one problem I had when I first started using system one for actual problems was that I was fairly easy to persuade—it took a while to really get comfortable with the idea that someone could have an opinion that was well-formed and made sense but still not be something that I would ‘have to’ support or even take into consideration, for example. Essentially my own concepts of what I wanted were not strong enough to handle being challenged directly, at first. (I got better.)
I’d certainly be interested in that. My own definitions are aimed at teaching people not to abstract away from experience, including emotional experience. Certainly there is some abstraction at that level, it’s just a different kind of abstraction (ISTM) than system 2 abstraction.
In particular, what I’m calilng system 1 does not generally use complex sentence structure or long utterances, and the referents of its “sentences” are almost always concrete nouns, with its principal abstractions being emotional labels rather than conceptual ones.
I consider “should X” and “deserve X” to both be emotional labels, since they code for attitude and action towards X, and so both are well within system 1 scope. When used by system 2, they may carry totally different connotations, and have nothing to do with what the speaker actually believes they deserve or should do, and especially little to do with what they’ll actually do.
For example, a statement like, “People should respect the rights of others and let them have what they deserve” is absolutely System 2, whereas, a statement like “I don’t deserve it” (especially if experienced emotionally) is well within System 1 territory.
It’s entirely possible that my definition of system 1⁄2 is more than a little out of whack with yours or the original S&W definition, but under my definition it’s pretty easy to learn to distinguish S1 utterances from S2 utterances, at least within the context of mind hacking, where I or someone else is trying to find out what’s really going on in System 1 in relation to a topic, and distinguish it from System 2′s confabulated theories.
However, since you claim to be able to observe system 1 directly, this would seem to put you in a privileged position with respect to changing yourself—in principle you should be able to observe what beliefs create any undesired behaviors or emotional responses. Since that’s the hard part of mind hacking IME, I’m a bit surprised you haven’t done more with the “easy” part (i.e. changing the contents of System 1).
Yep, it mostly uses nouns, simple verbs, relatedness catgegorizations (‘because’) , behavior categorizations (‘should’, ‘avoid with this degree of priority’), and a few semi-abstract concepts like ‘this week’. Surprisingly, I don’t often ‘see’ the concepts of good or bad—they seem to be more built-in to certain nouns and verbs, and changing my opinion of a thing causes it to ‘look’ completely different. (That’s also not the only thing that can cause a concept to change appearance—one of my closest friends has mellowed from a very nervous shade of orange to a wonderfully centered and calm medium-dark chocolate color over the course of the last year or so.)
Hmm… heh, it actually sounds like I just don’t use system 2, then.
I have and do, actually, and there’s very little that’s ‘undesirable’ left in there that I’m aware of (an irrational but so far not problematic fear of teenagers and a rationally-based but problematic fear of mental health professionals and, by extension, doctors are the only two things that come to mind that I’d change, and I’ve already done significant work on the second or I wouldn’t be able to calmly have this conversation with you). The major limitation is that I can only see what’s at hand, and it takes a degree of concentration to do so. I can’t detangle my thought process directly while I’m trying to carry on a conversation, unless it’s directly related to exactly what I’m doing at the moment, and I can’t fix problems that I haven’t noticed or have forgotten about.
I’m going to be putting together a simple display on conceptual synesthesia for my Neuroversity project this week… I’ll be sure to send you a link when it’s done.
I’ve been thinking more about this… or, not really. One of the downsides to my particular mind-setup is that it takes a long time to retrieve things from long-term memory, but I did retrieve something interesting just now.
When I was younger, I think I did use system two moderately regularly. I do vaguely remember intentionally trying to ‘figure things out’ using non-synesthetic reasoning—before I realized that the synesthesia was both real and useful—and coming to conclusions. I very distinctly remember having a mindset more than once of “I made this decision, so this is what I’m going to do, whether it makes sense now or not”. I also remember that I was unable to retain the logic behind those decisions, which made me very inflexible about them—I couldn’t use new data to update my decision, because I didn’t know how I’d come to the conclusion or how the new data should fit in. Using that system is demanding enough that it simply wasn’t possible to re-do my logic every single time a potentially-relevant piece of data turned up, and in fact I couldn’t remember enough of my reasoning to even figure out which pieces of data were likely to be relevant. The resulting single-mindedness is much less useful than the ability to actually be flexible about your actions, and after having that forcibly pointed out by reality a few times, I stopped using that method altogether.
There does seem to be a degree of epistemic hygiene necessary to switch entirely to using system one, though. I do remember, vaguely, that one problem I had when I first started using system one for actual problems was that I was fairly easy to persuade—it took a while to really get comfortable with the idea that someone could have an opinion that was well-formed and made sense but still not be something that I would ‘have to’ support or even take into consideration, for example. Essentially my own concepts of what I wanted were not strong enough to handle being challenged directly, at first. (I got better.)