I love this comment. I expect that whatever must be going on in your head for you to have written it is near the top of “good things that could plausibly result from my writing this essay series”. I am delighted.
I, too, will now say some rambly things that are part of my process of thinking rather than any sort of conclusion. I predict that they will sound a lot more confident than I actually feel.
According to me, you’re obviously interacting with the territory when you’re doing math. (I say this even though I’ve never watched you math, and have only barely dipped my toes into math myself, which is perhaps suspicious. But I shall continue this line of thought.) You’re almost certainly pressing your whole self up against the territory over and over again, sometimes lifting an arm and replacing it slightly differently when you feel a gap, some sensation of not-quite-the-right-fit-yet. How good you are at math probably depends a whole lot on how much integrity you have in your dedication to this contact (where “integrity” more often feels from the inside like “can’t bring myself to have it be another way despite the struggle”, as opposed to the “dutiful” way it sometimes looks from the outside as though it feels). This is most of the difference between “math” and “the fake math-like thing people often do in high school and sometimes undergrad before they begin to know what math is”.
Since this is an intro series of essays, there’s a TON of detail and nuance and complication I left out. One piece of nuance I ended up leaving out came up in discussion with Robin, one of my alpha readers.
(Sorry, people who are reading this before the sequence has finished publishing. I’m about to talk about something from two essays ahead, which Benya has seen but you have not. You might want to wait a few days before continuing.)
In one of my drafts, I claimed that, “A memory of an arm involves greater presence of a contacted than does the description of a fictional arm in a novel. A photograph has more presence than a memory.” (The final draft says something similar, but hopefully a bit more clearly.) And this sort of tripped Robin up. At first they were like “Wait that’s wrong!” Then they mulled it over a bit and ended up writing,
> okay, I think I’m finally getting what you meant to point at here (and correct me if I’m wrong): you’re pointing at a spectrum of territory-ness, of there-ness, of what can be contacted. > (I think you call this “presence” later on? okay, presence is actually a pretty good word for it.) > and so when it comes to looking at the territory we’d call “arm”, you’re asserting that the following scenarios start with the most presence and decrease in order: > touching an arm > photograph of an arm > memory of an arm > description of an arm in a novel > ? > i think part of my initial confusion was also that “memory” is often the sort of contacted that I mean to engage with, and so when you were asserting it had less presence than a photograph, a part of me was like, “woah that’s wrong!!!”
They’re totally right here, at least about what I think. Somewhere, in some previous draft that I can’t find right now, I had a footnote, probably in this essay (“The Territory”), which said something relevant about Focusing. I really wish I could find that ultimately omitted footnote. But anyway, I think the main thing that Focusing has going for it, compared to most other introspective methods, is its insistence on making and maintaining contact with the territory. The region of territory you’re contacting during Focusing is your own feelings/thoughts/attitudes etc. And the reason it’s such a huge breakthrough for so many people, I conjecture, is that they’re used to imagining that the map/territory distinction is the same as the internal/external distinction, so their heuristics and intuitions about how to engage with the the territory by default turn off when they try to deal with their own minds. Or something like that. But in fact their own minds are part of the territory, and you get different results when you treat your mind as part of the territory instead of treating it as (what? I’m not sure either! I too am a bit confused! Treating it as a story that follows story rules? Treating it as fundamentally mysterious? Treating it as the representations of it in other people’s heads? All of these seem like things people do to their inner workings, an not much like things cartographers do to rivers.).
I suspect that the map/territory distinction itself is best thought of as a kind of cognitive first aid. (It’s better to have tourniquets than to not have tourniquets, because otherwise people bleed to death. But there’s a lot more to medicine than first aid, and a tourniquet will never reattach a severed arm.) Though at some point in a person’s cognitive development, that’s true of just about any concept. I suspect that what really matters is the quality/methodology/attitude of engagement, rather than the distinction between what-sort-of-thing-you’re-engaging with, and the map/territory distinction is merely instrumental in leading a lot of people toward a different, frequently-better-for-epistemic-rationality quality of engagement, much as Focusing’s emphasis on the body as a source of information acts as a bridge that lets people introspect in a new kind of way.
All of this discussion gets at the motivation behind the next (half-)essay in this sequence, “On Realness”. My investigation of “realness” began as a puzzle: Everything that exists is real, right? Like by definition? So how come some things seem more real than others?
I think somewhere in that comment I meant to link to my essay on primitive introspection, but never got around to it. I think I meant to say something about how the most useful sense organ for receiving data about math, whatever that is, is the prefrontal cortex, and the reason naturalism stuff keeps resonating with you is because naturalism is largely about improving your PFC-qua-sense-organ the same way a novice perfumer is in the process of improving their nose-qua-sense-organ. Maybe.
I love this comment. I expect that whatever must be going on in your head for you to have written it is near the top of “good things that could plausibly result from my writing this essay series”. I am delighted.
I, too, will now say some rambly things that are part of my process of thinking rather than any sort of conclusion. I predict that they will sound a lot more confident than I actually feel.
According to me, you’re obviously interacting with the territory when you’re doing math. (I say this even though I’ve never watched you math, and have only barely dipped my toes into math myself, which is perhaps suspicious. But I shall continue this line of thought.) You’re almost certainly pressing your whole self up against the territory over and over again, sometimes lifting an arm and replacing it slightly differently when you feel a gap, some sensation of not-quite-the-right-fit-yet. How good you are at math probably depends a whole lot on how much integrity you have in your dedication to this contact (where “integrity” more often feels from the inside like “can’t bring myself to have it be another way despite the struggle”, as opposed to the “dutiful” way it sometimes looks from the outside as though it feels). This is most of the difference between “math” and “the fake math-like thing people often do in high school and sometimes undergrad before they begin to know what math is”.
Since this is an intro series of essays, there’s a TON of detail and nuance and complication I left out. One piece of nuance I ended up leaving out came up in discussion with Robin, one of my alpha readers.
(Sorry, people who are reading this before the sequence has finished publishing. I’m about to talk about something from two essays ahead, which Benya has seen but you have not. You might want to wait a few days before continuing.)
In one of my drafts, I claimed that, “A memory of an arm involves greater presence of a contacted than does the description of a fictional arm in a novel. A photograph has more presence than a memory.” (The final draft says something similar, but hopefully a bit more clearly.) And this sort of tripped Robin up. At first they were like “Wait that’s wrong!” Then they mulled it over a bit and ended up writing,
> okay, I think I’m finally getting what you meant to point at here (and correct me if I’m wrong): you’re pointing at a spectrum of territory-ness, of there-ness, of what can be contacted.
> (I think you call this “presence” later on? okay, presence is actually a pretty good word for it.)
> and so when it comes to looking at the territory we’d call “arm”, you’re asserting that the following scenarios start with the most presence and decrease in order:
> touching an arm > photograph of an arm > memory of an arm > description of an arm in a novel
> ?
> i think part of my initial confusion was also that “memory” is often the sort of contacted that I mean to engage with, and so when you were asserting it had less presence than a photograph, a part of me was like, “woah that’s wrong!!!”
They’re totally right here, at least about what I think. Somewhere, in some previous draft that I can’t find right now, I had a footnote, probably in this essay (“The Territory”), which said something relevant about Focusing. I really wish I could find that ultimately omitted footnote. But anyway, I think the main thing that Focusing has going for it, compared to most other introspective methods, is its insistence on making and maintaining contact with the territory. The region of territory you’re contacting during Focusing is your own feelings/thoughts/attitudes etc. And the reason it’s such a huge breakthrough for so many people, I conjecture, is that they’re used to imagining that the map/territory distinction is the same as the internal/external distinction, so their heuristics and intuitions about how to engage with the the territory by default turn off when they try to deal with their own minds. Or something like that. But in fact their own minds are part of the territory, and you get different results when you treat your mind as part of the territory instead of treating it as (what? I’m not sure either! I too am a bit confused! Treating it as a story that follows story rules? Treating it as fundamentally mysterious? Treating it as the representations of it in other people’s heads? All of these seem like things people do to their inner workings, an not much like things cartographers do to rivers.).
I suspect that the map/territory distinction itself is best thought of as a kind of cognitive first aid. (It’s better to have tourniquets than to not have tourniquets, because otherwise people bleed to death. But there’s a lot more to medicine than first aid, and a tourniquet will never reattach a severed arm.) Though at some point in a person’s cognitive development, that’s true of just about any concept. I suspect that what really matters is the quality/methodology/attitude of engagement, rather than the distinction between what-sort-of-thing-you’re-engaging with, and the map/territory distinction is merely instrumental in leading a lot of people toward a different, frequently-better-for-epistemic-rationality quality of engagement, much as Focusing’s emphasis on the body as a source of information acts as a bridge that lets people introspect in a new kind of way.
All of this discussion gets at the motivation behind the next (half-)essay in this sequence, “On Realness”. My investigation of “realness” began as a puzzle: Everything that exists is real, right? Like by definition? So how come some things seem more real than others?
I think somewhere in that comment I meant to link to my essay on primitive introspection, but never got around to it. I think I meant to say something about how the most useful sense organ for receiving data about math, whatever that is, is the prefrontal cortex, and the reason naturalism stuff keeps resonating with you is because naturalism is largely about improving your PFC-qua-sense-organ the same way a novice perfumer is in the process of improving their nose-qua-sense-organ. Maybe.