A big problem with this post is that I don’t have a clear idea of “tanha” is/isn’t, so can’t really tell how broad various claims are. With that in mind, I want to lay out the closest sane-sounding interpretation I see of that section, and hopefully get feedback on what that interpretation does/doesn’t capture about the points you’re trying to make.
Jaynes talks about the “mind projection fallacy”, in which people interpret subjective aspects of their own models as properties of the world. An example: people interpret their own lack of knowledge/understanding about a phenomenon as the phenomenon itself being inherently mysterious or irreducibly complex. I think mind projection especially happens with value judgements—i.e. people treat “goodness” or “badness” as properties of things out in the world.
Cognitively speaking, treating value as a property of stuff in the world can be useful for planning: if I notice that e.g. one extra counterfactual gallon of milk would be high-value (where the counterfactual intuitively says “all else equal”), then I go look for plans which get me that extra gallon of milk, and I can factor that search apart from much of the rest of my planning-process. But the flip side of assigning value to counterfactuals over stuff-in-the-world is fabricated options: I do not actually have the ability to make a gallon of milk magically appear before me without doing anything else, that’s a fabricated option useful as an intermediate cognitive step in planning, it’s not a real option actually available to me. The only things a real plan can counterfact over are my own actions, and only insofar as those actions are within my realistic possibility space.
Your section on “tanha” sounds roughly like projecting value into the world, and then mentally latching on to an attractive high-value fabricated option.
How well does that capture the thing you’re trying to point to?
I haven’t read OP yet, just a quick translation note:
The Sanskrit word “tanha” shares an etymology with English words like “tenacious”, “tendency”, and “tenet”. The PIE root means “grip” or “hold”.
I think most folk in my social circles who use “tanha” these days are referencing Romeo’s “(mis)Translating the Buddha”:
Tanha is usually translated as desire or craving but this is wrong and misleading. Tanha is more literally translated as ‘fused to’ or ‘welded to’. It immediately follows the mental moment that you zoom in with the attentional aperture on something. It could be that a flower or an item on the shelf at the supermarket captures your attention, or you turn your head to catch more detail as you pass by an accident on the road. Many hundreds of thousands of such events take place in the course of a single day. With most of them attention then relaxes and makes space for the next thing. But with some small proportion you find the mind doesn’t quite ‘unclench’ from the object or some aspect of the object. This tension aspect is why it is sometimes translated as ‘grasping’ which is closer. Imagine something you aren’t finished with being pulled out of your hand and you tensing your fingers to resist.
Your section on “tanha” sounds roughly like projecting value into the world, and then mentally latching on to an attractive high-value fabricated option.
I would say that the core issue has more to do with the mental latching (or at least a particular flavor of it, which is what I’m claiming tanha refers to) than with projecting value into the world. I’m basically saying that any endorsed mental latching is downstream of an active blind spot, regardless of whether it’s making the error of projecting value into the world.
I think this probably brings us back to:
A big problem with this post is that I don’t have a clear idea of “tanha” is/isn’t, so can’t really tell how broad various claims are.
A couple of additional pointers that might be helpful:
I think of tanha as corresponding to the phenomenology of resisting an update because of a trapped prior.
I think tanha is present whenever we get triggered, under the standard usage of the word (like in “trigger warning”), and I think of milder forms of tanha as being kind of like micro-triggers.
Whenever we’re suffering, and there’s a sense of rush and urgency coming from lower subsystems that override higher cognition in service of trying to make the suffering go away, there’s tanha involved.
(Note that I don’t consider myself an expert on Buddhism, so take these pointers with a grain of salt.)
I think it might be helpful if you elaborated on specific confusions you have around the concept of tanha.
Here’s something possibly relevant I wrote in a draft of this post that I ended up cutting out, because people seemed to keep getting confused about what I was trying to say. I’m including this in the hopes that it will clarify rather than further confuse, but I will warn in advance that the latter may happen instead...
The Goodness of Reality hypothesis is closely related to the Buddhist claim of non-self, which says that any fixed and unchanging sense of self we identify with is illusory; I partially interpret “illusory” to mean “causally downstream of a trapped prior”. One corollary of non-self is that it’s erroneous for us to model ourselves as a discrete entity with fixed and unchanging terminal values, because this entity would be a fixed and unchanging self. This means that anyone employing reasoning of the form “well, it makes sense for me to feel tanha toward X, because my terminal values imply that X is bad!” is basing their reasoning on the faulty premise that they actually have terminal values in the first place, as opposed to active blind spots masquerading as terminal values.
I think mind projection especially happens with value judgements—i.e. people treat “goodness” or “badness” as properties of things out in the world.
It’s worth noting, I think, that Steve Byrnes has done a great job describing and analyzing this phenomenon in Section 2.2 of his post on Valence & Normativity. I have mentioned before that I think his post is excellent, so it seems worthwhile to signal-boost it here as well.
Cognitively speaking, treating value as a property of stuff in the world can be useful for planning
Also mentioned and analyzed in Section 2.3 of Byrnes’s post :)
A big problem with this post is that I don’t have a clear idea of “tanha” is/isn’t, so can’t really tell how broad various claims are. With that in mind, I want to lay out the closest sane-sounding interpretation I see of that section, and hopefully get feedback on what that interpretation does/doesn’t capture about the points you’re trying to make.
Jaynes talks about the “mind projection fallacy”, in which people interpret subjective aspects of their own models as properties of the world. An example: people interpret their own lack of knowledge/understanding about a phenomenon as the phenomenon itself being inherently mysterious or irreducibly complex. I think mind projection especially happens with value judgements—i.e. people treat “goodness” or “badness” as properties of things out in the world.
Cognitively speaking, treating value as a property of stuff in the world can be useful for planning: if I notice that e.g. one extra counterfactual gallon of milk would be high-value (where the counterfactual intuitively says “all else equal”), then I go look for plans which get me that extra gallon of milk, and I can factor that search apart from much of the rest of my planning-process. But the flip side of assigning value to counterfactuals over stuff-in-the-world is fabricated options: I do not actually have the ability to make a gallon of milk magically appear before me without doing anything else, that’s a fabricated option useful as an intermediate cognitive step in planning, it’s not a real option actually available to me. The only things a real plan can counterfact over are my own actions, and only insofar as those actions are within my realistic possibility space.
Your section on “tanha” sounds roughly like projecting value into the world, and then mentally latching on to an attractive high-value fabricated option.
How well does that capture the thing you’re trying to point to?
I haven’t read OP yet, just a quick translation note:
The Sanskrit word “tanha” shares an etymology with English words like “tenacious”, “tendency”, and “tenet”. The PIE root means “grip” or “hold”.
I think most folk in my social circles who use “tanha” these days are referencing Romeo’s “(mis)Translating the Buddha”:
I also tried to outline a model of tanha in my posts about explaining suffering in Buddhist context [1, 2].
I would say that the core issue has more to do with the mental latching (or at least a particular flavor of it, which is what I’m claiming tanha refers to) than with projecting value into the world. I’m basically saying that any endorsed mental latching is downstream of an active blind spot, regardless of whether it’s making the error of projecting value into the world.
I think this probably brings us back to:
A couple of additional pointers that might be helpful:
I think of tanha as corresponding to the phenomenology of resisting an update because of a trapped prior.
I think tanha is present whenever we get triggered, under the standard usage of the word (like in “trigger warning”), and I think of milder forms of tanha as being kind of like micro-triggers.
Whenever we’re suffering, and there’s a sense of rush and urgency coming from lower subsystems that override higher cognition in service of trying to make the suffering go away, there’s tanha involved.
(Note that I don’t consider myself an expert on Buddhism, so take these pointers with a grain of salt.)
I think it might be helpful if you elaborated on specific confusions you have around the concept of tanha.
Here’s something possibly relevant I wrote in a draft of this post that I ended up cutting out, because people seemed to keep getting confused about what I was trying to say. I’m including this in the hopes that it will clarify rather than further confuse, but I will warn in advance that the latter may happen instead...
It’s worth noting, I think, that Steve Byrnes has done a great job describing and analyzing this phenomenon in Section 2.2 of his post on Valence & Normativity. I have mentioned before that I think his post is excellent, so it seems worthwhile to signal-boost it here as well.
Also mentioned and analyzed in Section 2.3 of Byrnes’s post :)