My unedited notes while reading this post, including an initial exercise log:
”Your cognition is much more powerful than just the part you have conscious access to, and it’s crucial to make good use of it.”
heck yeah
“A small tweak to how your brain processes information in general is worth more than a big upgrade to your conscious repository of cognitive tricks.”
absofuckinlutely
“More creativity and good ideas just “popping into your head”.”
oh that is appealing; pregnancy killed this and it’s coming back but i’m still starving
“Once you realize exactly what is and what isn’t under your conscious control, you stop beating yourself about not doing the impossible.”
is this true?
What does it mean to “tune” your “cognitive strategies”?
“Having good quality thinking happen effortlessly and automatically is great… unless you are a control freak, in which case you should Tune Your Emotional Processing before even reading this page.”
oh shoot, am I a control freak? i think i might be a control freak. but maybe not in the way Squirrell’s talking about? probably i should read both essays but i bet i’m ready for this one.
“How to tell if you have it?”
this section reminds me a lot of a bit of my writing that Duncan shared to LW once. i wonder if i can find it.
Though I think what I demonstrate in this email does match the second two bullet points, it doesn’t really match the first. This session of thought was difficult, and required willpower. That’s why I don’t do it (in this much depth) constantly.
“When you don’t like whatever has risen up to the top of the cauldron, the last thing you want is to try to “fix it”. You only have access to the topmost layer, so it would be hopelessly ineffective anyway. But it’s much worse than that—by attempting to “fix” your cognition, you stop being able to see how it works. How well your cognition works is shown not by what thoughts you have at the moment, but rather by the pattern of how one or more thoughts combine into a new thought (“cognitive strategy”). Instead, you want to learn as much as possible about the differences (“deltas”) between each thought and the next, as they occur to you.”
Oh wow. Another take on the problem solving/study framing, I think.
From “Getting Started with Naturalism”, in [the section](Starting Place 2: Try Catching the Spark (All Of It, Or Just Part Of It)) where I summarize “Catching the Spark”: The final section of the procedure, “Choosing Your Quest”, leads you to reconnect with your intuitions from the beginning, then to choose a “quest”, a related question that will guide your investigations going forward. Going through this part of the process tends to be especially important for people who started out desperate to solve a problem (provided naturalism is in fact a good approach for them); it requires that you re-frame whatever you hope to solve as something that might be understood, something whose workings may be discovered through careful investigation.
It recommends something a little different though. It’s a goal orientation-->study framing, but “learn as much as possible about the deltas between temporally adjacent thoughts” is a place to focus attention that I don’t believe I’ve ever attempted.
this seems like pretty much an obvious, complete, ready-to-go technique that i could immediately implement the moment i chose to. however i do not think the “obvious” version would be “effortless” or “not requiring of willpower”, so perhaps i’m wrong about what the technique is supposed to be.
meta: i appear to be halfway through the post and part of me is still waiting for the post to start because it’s happening in the form of bullet points, which apparently i categorize as “part of an introduction, not the body of a post”. but actually i think this just is the post.
“However, by carefully looking at the “deltas” between conscious thoughts, we can get rid of the last remaining level of indirection (this is the key insight of this whole page!): Cognitive strategy → Reward or punishment You have learned to perceive your cognitive strategies as they happen, and developed some heuristics that tell you whether they are good or bad. Now your brain can update cognitive strategies immediately, and do it regardless of the topic of your thoughts. Even when you generate a useless idea from another useless idea, you can still track whether the cognitive strategy behind it was sound, and learn from the experience.”
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. hmmmmmm. hmm.
this.… seems...........… great if you’re happy to rely on your existing taste network. this is what the part in Zen and Motorcycles is about, where the guy demonstrates to the students that they already know how to write well.
granted, i think most people are shit at putting their existing taste network to use when doing almost anything deliberately, precisely because they don’t know how to observe experiences that are quiet or fleeting, and so there’s a ton of value here.
but apparently i was expecting something different, and something about the distance between what i expected and what i heard made me be all “this some kind of dangerous/bad/circular”
oh oh oh i think i’ve got it. what happened was, i thought this was going to tell me about improving my thoughts. instead it is telling me about improving my actions by listening to my thoughts.
no, reading back through, i think that’s not what happened.
suppose i read this section while being deliberately grumpy at it. what stands out?
“punishment”
(oh, some curiosity seems to have made it through the grumpiness: what is “cognitive strategies”?)
“whether they are good or bad”
“sound”
what are the grumps picking out here? they seem to be picking out things about judgement and rejection.
i suspect i do not disagree with Squirrel anything propositional here. my current story is that they and i have different aesthetic intuitions about how to relate to preconscious thought, and my introspective skill rests heavily on my aesthetic taste. wait, surely that *is* a substantive disagreement? no, i think it’s not; i think it’s likely they accomplish almost exactly the same thing using almost exactly the same strategies, but their version of the strategies feels a little different, and it sounds a little different when described. hmmmmm. i’m still conflicted on this. ah, ok perhaps the thing is:
there’s a type of strategy with parts X, Y, Z. they and i have the same Y and Z. X can actually be several different things, as long as it has properties that allow it to fill the right roles in the strategy with Y and Z. their X’ involves something judgement-flavored. my X″ involves something awesomeness/discernment/beauty-flavored. both X’ and X″ function basically the same in the overall strategy. (obviously discernment is mostly another word for judgement.)
“Note: awareness is a muscle. Time spent trying to see your thoughts more clearly is time well spent, regardless of the degree to which you succeed at getting any specific results.”
yes ok fine. i will compile and publish the load of attention stuff that seemed kind of tangential and i wasn’t sure people would be interested in.
“Pick a small problem, question or thinking puzzle of any kind.”
I will divide 347 by 16 in my head. (i am bad with numbers and this may be embarrassing if anybody reads this but i will do it anyway.)
“Beware of “school trauma”: think about whatever you want to think about, not things someone else would like you to think about.”
do i want to think about dividing 347 by 16? no not really. i do sort of want to be able to mental math, but perhaps i can find a better topic for this exercise. what do i actually want to think about? what is exciting to me right now? music, especially Arvo Pärt. but i’m not sure i have any live puzzles on that at the moment. there’s “why do i keep being unable to read the bass line year after year?”, but i think i’m reaching for a less fully internal problem. same with “how is it that i’m still only reading tabs for guitar instead of standard notation?” there’s of course this problem i’m trying to solve at this very moment, but i don’t want something so self-referential either. still, i’m drawn to “something with this guitar, since it’s right here and also about music.” hm what if i tried to describe Pärt’s tintinnabuli compositional method *spatially*, using the guitar neck? i’m not really sure that makes sense, but if i succeeded, i imagine it would allow me to *improvise* guitar music in tintinnabulation! yes bingo that is a small external non-self-referential problem i want to think about. (i don’t know if it’s a “thinking puzzle”; i don’t know what “thinking” is.)
“If you don’t have any ideas, you can always pick “picking a puzzle” as your puzzle.”
oh lol apparently Squirrell didn’t share my intuition about self reference.
“Load the puzzle into your memory, and let go.”
i’m not sure what they mean by “into my memory”. but i will pick up the guitar and try to get a handle on the problem. and then “let go”? interesting that i chose the phrase “get a handle on”.
i think i need to read more before i get going.
“Instead of focusing on solving the puzzle, focus on the question ‘where do my thoughts go when this puzzle enters my attention’?” <3<3<3<3<3
“Aim for sub-second timescales. In fact, you can easily have a chain of 5 or more conscious thoughts in one second. If you think you can’t, you’re just missing skill in noticing it.” who the fuck is this is this me from a parallel dimension what is going on. i feel electrified right now. like watching Stephan Lambiel on the ice.
me in What It’s Like To Notice Things: “(”Can you really distinguish between 200 and 500 milliseconds?” Yes, but it’s an acquired skill. I spent a block of a few minutes every day for a month, then several blocks a day for about a week, doing this Psychomotor Vigilance Task when I was gathering data for the polyphasic sleep experiment. It gives you fast feedback on simple response time. I’m not sure if it’s useful for anything else, but it comes in handy when taking notes on experiences that pass very quickly.)”
ok this seems like a good point at which to try a bit, before moving to the next step
it’s unfortunate that i can’t hold the guitar and type a the same time. “easily”; i can’t hold the guitar and type easily at the same time. i play a string. there’s a fruit fly here. the string i play is A. but i don’t need to know that it’s A, because i’m doing this spatially. i suspect i am not doing “let go”, unless “let go” is in contrast to something i’m already not doing. what if i “let go” more though? what if i load the problem into memory more though. i have a guitar, but where is tintinnabuli? there is force here, when i do that. do i want the force? i suspect i do not want the force, but i do want tintinnabuli present. what if i invite it with openness, while holding the guitar. i play the second string. i kill the gnat, and i’m sad and conflicted about killing the gnat. i refocus on the guitar. i play the second string, and i plan to play the second string over and over while inviting “tintinnabuli”. i imagine “down”. the first string comes to mind. “two steps”. but! but up could happen also. it is a rule, a rule that is not yet established. “the t line has a relationship to the melody. i haven’t yet invented that relationship.” i think words, and i want to think spaces. curious: what are these concepts spatially? i’m aware of frets.
all right that’s enough of a sample for now. i’ll continue reading.
ah i think i have not captured the level of granularity Squirrell wants. i didn’t realize we were working so small. i’ll try again.
left hand fingers on the strings in a familiar pattern-->settling in-->plucking as comes naturally with my right hand-->happiness/comfort/”harmony”/resolution-->”arpeggio”
the act of typing is definitely getting in the way as i hold the guitar. if i want a reflective record, i think i’ll either need to record my voice, or plan not to record during and rely on my memory.
“Think which “deltas” are doing good work for you, and which aren’t.”
this part gives me the grumps again
“All you ever need to do is notice useful deltas, and have that little “oh, nice!” reaction. That’s it. Really.”
i’m not sure what “useful” is doing here. but also i feel grumpy at “useful”, and i feel reflectively grumpy at “i’m not sure what ‘useful’ is doing here” because it’s a smoke screen for feeling grumpy at “useful”. “i’m not sure what ‘useful’ is doing here” sounds like it involves curiosity but mostly it doesn’t. if i meant it for real, i’d want to know what “useful” is doing here, but mainly i just want “useful” to go away. however, “wanting ‘useful’ to go away” isn’t allowed, so i pretend i am expressing ignorance or confusion. anyway, i don’t need to do anything besides… wait, hang on a second. it’s the space between thoughts. that’s the point. not the thoughts. i thought i had the hang of it but i was wrong. try again. don’t write it down this time, just figure out how to improvise tintinnabulation spatially, and look at the space between thoughts.
uuuuuuhhhhh ok this might be a big deal. i can’t tell yet. it’s a little unfamiliar and not yet easy. i’m not certain it’ll go anywhere. but it feels different, and good. i’ll describe what i was doing.
first of all, i got rid of words. words were obviously in my way. way too cumbersome. i don’t think in words, especially not when engaging with music. instead i put my hands on the guitar and started doing things. i tried to rest my attention on the spaces between thoughts while doing things. on the transitions. “thoughts” is certainly a misleading term here, for me. “impulses” is much more accurate. “the things that moved my fingers”, perhaps. but smaller than that even; sometimes it was the things that moved my fingers, sometimes it was the redirection of my attention in response to what i heard, sometimes it was the way my chest felt. but i tried to… no, “rest” is the wrong word. i did not rest my attention on the space between mental movements. my attention *surfed* the space between mental movements. i wouldn’t describe it as “effortless”, but it was not at all “thinky”. and i did begin to make progress on the problem, “using only system one” or something. it felt nice. but i didn’t get very far. i’m not sure the “progress” was real.
more concretely, what did i do, with my fingers? i played some notes, and i liked some of them in sequence. so i replayed those notes, and then i added more afterward, and then i felt the completion of a phrase. i repeated the phrase several times. then i started adding notes on top of the melody. well, beneath the melody. but at first i didn’t like the notes. i felt a traffic jam, and looked for its source, and realized that i was trying to play two different notes on the same string. i searched for the note i wanted on the string below, and found it. oh, i hadn’t realized this before now, but i did uncover an important principle of spatial tintinnabuli composition: the fifth fret of the adjacent lower string equals the open string. i knew this already, of course, but i had not contextualized it this way. i had used this information to tune the instrument, and sometimes i had intellectually-top-down transcribed something into another physical chord configuration using this principle, but i had not visualized the sixth and seventh frets of the adjacent lower string as copies of the first and second frets of the string above it. i really did make concrete progress on the problem in practice without thinking about it intellectually.
oh fuck i just remembered that the very earliest version of my attempt to communicate about “naturalism” qua comprehensive method was called “how to solve a problem before you know what the problem is”. that sounds an awful lot like what i did here. but this method is smaller and a little different. this is for immediate right-in-front-of-you-all-at-once problems. (maybe it’s for other kinds of problems also.)
“The delta which moves you into noticing your deltas is very useful. Give it the reward it deserves!”
yeah i seem to really hate this reward/punishment framing, yet i can’t belief report that it doesn’t accurately describe what i’m doing (and what i endorse doing)
Since writing this post I’ve tried to do this in workshops a few time. People struggled a lot with it. One thing I noticed here was Logan is pretty skilled at the related subskills here, and it still requires a lot of attention and iteration to grok it and get the hang of it.
I’m not sure whether I grokked the skill or not when I first did it. I think I was doing a cruder thing that was still really helpful. I’m honestly still not sure whether the thing with the deltas is helpful over the raw stream of thoughts.
After iterating in workshops a bit, I now start people off with ’load the puzzle up, and then notice the very first thing that pops into your mind and then stop. And then look at it a bit. And then go back to the puzzle again and notice the first two things that happen in your mind, and stop. And only then go on to observing yourself as you solve the puzzle.
My unedited notes while reading this post, including an initial exercise log:
”Your cognition is much more powerful than just the part you have conscious access to, and it’s crucial to make good use of it.”
heck yeah
“A small tweak to how your brain processes information in general is worth more than a big upgrade to your conscious repository of cognitive tricks.”
absofuckinlutely
“More creativity and good ideas just “popping into your head”.”
oh that is appealing; pregnancy killed this and it’s coming back but i’m still starving
“Once you realize exactly what is and what isn’t under your conscious control, you stop beating yourself about not doing the impossible.”
is this true?
What does it mean to “tune” your “cognitive strategies”?
“Having good quality thinking happen effortlessly and automatically is great… unless you are a control freak, in which case you should Tune Your Emotional Processing before even reading this page.”
oh shoot, am I a control freak? i think i might be a control freak. but maybe not in the way Squirrell’s talking about? probably i should read both essays but i bet i’m ready for this one.
“How to tell if you have it?”
this section reminds me a lot of a bit of my writing that Duncan shared to LW once. i wonder if i can find it.
no i cannot find it.
Duncan found it for me!
Though I think what I demonstrate in this email does match the second two bullet points, it doesn’t really match the first. This session of thought was difficult, and required willpower. That’s why I don’t do it (in this much depth) constantly.
“When you don’t like whatever has risen up to the top of the cauldron, the last thing you want is to try to “fix it”. You only have access to the topmost layer, so it would be hopelessly ineffective anyway. But it’s much worse than that—by attempting to “fix” your cognition, you stop being able to see how it works. How well your cognition works is shown not by what thoughts you have at the moment, but rather by the pattern of how one or more thoughts combine into a new thought (“cognitive strategy”). Instead, you want to learn as much as possible about the differences (“deltas”) between each thought and the next, as they occur to you.”
Oh wow. Another take on the problem solving/study framing, I think.
From “Getting Started with Naturalism”, in [the section](Starting Place 2: Try Catching the Spark (All Of It, Or Just Part Of It)) where I summarize “Catching the Spark”: The final section of the procedure, “Choosing Your Quest”, leads you to reconnect with your intuitions from the beginning, then to choose a “quest”, a related question that will guide your investigations going forward. Going through this part of the process tends to be especially important for people who started out desperate to solve a problem (provided naturalism is in fact a good approach for them); it requires that you re-frame whatever you hope to solve as something that might be understood, something whose workings may be discovered through careful investigation.
It recommends something a little different though. It’s a goal orientation-->study framing, but “learn as much as possible about the deltas between temporally adjacent thoughts” is a place to focus attention that I don’t believe I’ve ever attempted.
this seems like pretty much an obvious, complete, ready-to-go technique that i could immediately implement the moment i chose to. however i do not think the “obvious” version would be “effortless” or “not requiring of willpower”, so perhaps i’m wrong about what the technique is supposed to be.
meta: i appear to be halfway through the post and part of me is still waiting for the post to start because it’s happening in the form of bullet points, which apparently i categorize as “part of an introduction, not the body of a post”. but actually i think this just is the post.
“However, by carefully looking at the “deltas” between conscious thoughts, we can get rid of the last remaining level of indirection (this is the key insight of this whole page!): Cognitive strategy → Reward or punishment You have learned to perceive your cognitive strategies as they happen, and developed some heuristics that tell you whether they are good or bad. Now your brain can update cognitive strategies immediately, and do it regardless of the topic of your thoughts. Even when you generate a useless idea from another useless idea, you can still track whether the cognitive strategy behind it was sound, and learn from the experience.”
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. hmmmmmm. hmm.
this.… seems...........… great if you’re happy to rely on your existing taste network. this is what the part in Zen and Motorcycles is about, where the guy demonstrates to the students that they already know how to write well.
granted, i think most people are shit at putting their existing taste network to use when doing almost anything deliberately, precisely because they don’t know how to observe experiences that are quiet or fleeting, and so there’s a ton of value here.
but apparently i was expecting something different, and something about the distance between what i expected and what i heard made me be all “this some kind of dangerous/bad/circular”
oh oh oh i think i’ve got it. what happened was, i thought this was going to tell me about improving my thoughts. instead it is telling me about improving my actions by listening to my thoughts.
no, reading back through, i think that’s not what happened.
suppose i read this section while being deliberately grumpy at it. what stands out?
“punishment”
(oh, some curiosity seems to have made it through the grumpiness: what is “cognitive strategies”?)
“whether they are good or bad”
“sound”
what are the grumps picking out here? they seem to be picking out things about judgement and rejection.
i suspect i do not disagree with Squirrel anything propositional here. my current story is that they and i have different aesthetic intuitions about how to relate to preconscious thought, and my introspective skill rests heavily on my aesthetic taste. wait, surely that *is* a substantive disagreement? no, i think it’s not; i think it’s likely they accomplish almost exactly the same thing using almost exactly the same strategies, but their version of the strategies feels a little different, and it sounds a little different when described. hmmmmm. i’m still conflicted on this. ah, ok perhaps the thing is:
there’s a type of strategy with parts X, Y, Z. they and i have the same Y and Z. X can actually be several different things, as long as it has properties that allow it to fill the right roles in the strategy with Y and Z. their X’ involves something judgement-flavored. my X″ involves something awesomeness/discernment/beauty-flavored. both X’ and X″ function basically the same in the overall strategy. (obviously discernment is mostly another word for judgement.)
“Note: awareness is a muscle. Time spent trying to see your thoughts more clearly is time well spent, regardless of the degree to which you succeed at getting any specific results.”
yes ok fine. i will compile and publish the load of attention stuff that seemed kind of tangential and i wasn’t sure people would be interested in.
“Pick a small problem, question or thinking puzzle of any kind.”
I will divide 347 by 16 in my head. (i am bad with numbers and this may be embarrassing if anybody reads this but i will do it anyway.)
“Beware of “school trauma”: think about whatever you want to think about, not things someone else would like you to think about.”
do i want to think about dividing 347 by 16? no not really. i do sort of want to be able to mental math, but perhaps i can find a better topic for this exercise. what do i actually want to think about? what is exciting to me right now? music, especially Arvo Pärt. but i’m not sure i have any live puzzles on that at the moment. there’s “why do i keep being unable to read the bass line year after year?”, but i think i’m reaching for a less fully internal problem. same with “how is it that i’m still only reading tabs for guitar instead of standard notation?” there’s of course this problem i’m trying to solve at this very moment, but i don’t want something so self-referential either. still, i’m drawn to “something with this guitar, since it’s right here and also about music.” hm what if i tried to describe Pärt’s tintinnabuli compositional method *spatially*, using the guitar neck? i’m not really sure that makes sense, but if i succeeded, i imagine it would allow me to *improvise* guitar music in tintinnabulation! yes bingo that is a small external non-self-referential problem i want to think about. (i don’t know if it’s a “thinking puzzle”; i don’t know what “thinking” is.)
“If you don’t have any ideas, you can always pick “picking a puzzle” as your puzzle.”
oh lol apparently Squirrell didn’t share my intuition about self reference.
“Load the puzzle into your memory, and let go.”
i’m not sure what they mean by “into my memory”. but i will pick up the guitar and try to get a handle on the problem. and then “let go”? interesting that i chose the phrase “get a handle on”.
i think i need to read more before i get going.
“Instead of focusing on solving the puzzle, focus on the question ‘where do my thoughts go when this puzzle enters my attention’?” <3<3<3<3<3
“Aim for sub-second timescales. In fact, you can easily have a chain of 5 or more conscious thoughts in one second. If you think you can’t, you’re just missing skill in noticing it.” who the fuck is this is this me from a parallel dimension what is going on. i feel electrified right now. like watching Stephan Lambiel on the ice.
me in What It’s Like To Notice Things: “(”Can you really distinguish between 200 and 500 milliseconds?” Yes, but it’s an acquired skill. I spent a block of a few minutes every day for a month, then several blocks a day for about a week, doing this Psychomotor Vigilance Task when I was gathering data for the polyphasic sleep experiment. It gives you fast feedback on simple response time. I’m not sure if it’s useful for anything else, but it comes in handy when taking notes on experiences that pass very quickly.)”
ok this seems like a good point at which to try a bit, before moving to the next step
it’s unfortunate that i can’t hold the guitar and type a the same time. “easily”; i can’t hold the guitar and type easily at the same time. i play a string. there’s a fruit fly here. the string i play is A. but i don’t need to know that it’s A, because i’m doing this spatially. i suspect i am not doing “let go”, unless “let go” is in contrast to something i’m already not doing. what if i “let go” more though? what if i load the problem into memory more though. i have a guitar, but where is tintinnabuli? there is force here, when i do that. do i want the force? i suspect i do not want the force, but i do want tintinnabuli present. what if i invite it with openness, while holding the guitar. i play the second string. i kill the gnat, and i’m sad and conflicted about killing the gnat. i refocus on the guitar. i play the second string, and i plan to play the second string over and over while inviting “tintinnabuli”. i imagine “down”. the first string comes to mind. “two steps”. but! but up could happen also. it is a rule, a rule that is not yet established. “the t line has a relationship to the melody. i haven’t yet invented that relationship.” i think words, and i want to think spaces. curious: what are these concepts spatially? i’m aware of frets.
all right that’s enough of a sample for now. i’ll continue reading.
ah i think i have not captured the level of granularity Squirrell wants. i didn’t realize we were working so small. i’ll try again.
left hand fingers on the strings in a familiar pattern-->settling in-->plucking as comes naturally with my right hand-->happiness/comfort/”harmony”/resolution-->”arpeggio”
the act of typing is definitely getting in the way as i hold the guitar. if i want a reflective record, i think i’ll either need to record my voice, or plan not to record during and rely on my memory.
“Think which “deltas” are doing good work for you, and which aren’t.”
this part gives me the grumps again
“All you ever need to do is notice useful deltas, and have that little “oh, nice!” reaction. That’s it. Really.”
i’m not sure what “useful” is doing here. but also i feel grumpy at “useful”, and i feel reflectively grumpy at “i’m not sure what ‘useful’ is doing here” because it’s a smoke screen for feeling grumpy at “useful”. “i’m not sure what ‘useful’ is doing here” sounds like it involves curiosity but mostly it doesn’t. if i meant it for real, i’d want to know what “useful” is doing here, but mainly i just want “useful” to go away. however, “wanting ‘useful’ to go away” isn’t allowed, so i pretend i am expressing ignorance or confusion. anyway, i don’t need to do anything besides… wait, hang on a second. it’s the space between thoughts. that’s the point. not the thoughts. i thought i had the hang of it but i was wrong. try again. don’t write it down this time, just figure out how to improvise tintinnabulation spatially, and look at the space between thoughts.
uuuuuuhhhhh ok this might be a big deal. i can’t tell yet. it’s a little unfamiliar and not yet easy. i’m not certain it’ll go anywhere. but it feels different, and good. i’ll describe what i was doing.
first of all, i got rid of words. words were obviously in my way. way too cumbersome. i don’t think in words, especially not when engaging with music. instead i put my hands on the guitar and started doing things. i tried to rest my attention on the spaces between thoughts while doing things. on the transitions. “thoughts” is certainly a misleading term here, for me. “impulses” is much more accurate. “the things that moved my fingers”, perhaps. but smaller than that even; sometimes it was the things that moved my fingers, sometimes it was the redirection of my attention in response to what i heard, sometimes it was the way my chest felt. but i tried to… no, “rest” is the wrong word. i did not rest my attention on the space between mental movements. my attention *surfed* the space between mental movements. i wouldn’t describe it as “effortless”, but it was not at all “thinky”. and i did begin to make progress on the problem, “using only system one” or something. it felt nice. but i didn’t get very far. i’m not sure the “progress” was real.
more concretely, what did i do, with my fingers? i played some notes, and i liked some of them in sequence. so i replayed those notes, and then i added more afterward, and then i felt the completion of a phrase. i repeated the phrase several times. then i started adding notes on top of the melody. well, beneath the melody. but at first i didn’t like the notes. i felt a traffic jam, and looked for its source, and realized that i was trying to play two different notes on the same string. i searched for the note i wanted on the string below, and found it. oh, i hadn’t realized this before now, but i did uncover an important principle of spatial tintinnabuli composition: the fifth fret of the adjacent lower string equals the open string. i knew this already, of course, but i had not contextualized it this way. i had used this information to tune the instrument, and sometimes i had intellectually-top-down transcribed something into another physical chord configuration using this principle, but i had not visualized the sixth and seventh frets of the adjacent lower string as copies of the first and second frets of the string above it. i really did make concrete progress on the problem in practice without thinking about it intellectually.
oh fuck i just remembered that the very earliest version of my attempt to communicate about “naturalism” qua comprehensive method was called “how to solve a problem before you know what the problem is”. that sounds an awful lot like what i did here. but this method is smaller and a little different. this is for immediate right-in-front-of-you-all-at-once problems. (maybe it’s for other kinds of problems also.)
“The delta which moves you into noticing your deltas is very useful. Give it the reward it deserves!”
yeah i seem to really hate this reward/punishment framing, yet i can’t belief report that it doesn’t accurately describe what i’m doing (and what i endorse doing)
I just reread this.
Since writing this post I’ve tried to do this in workshops a few time. People struggled a lot with it. One thing I noticed here was Logan is pretty skilled at the related subskills here, and it still requires a lot of attention and iteration to grok it and get the hang of it.
I’m not sure whether I grokked the skill or not when I first did it. I think I was doing a cruder thing that was still really helpful. I’m honestly still not sure whether the thing with the deltas is helpful over the raw stream of thoughts.
After iterating in workshops a bit, I now start people off with ’load the puzzle up, and then notice the very first thing that pops into your mind and then stop. And then look at it a bit. And then go back to the puzzle again and notice the first two things that happen in your mind, and stop. And only then go on to observing yourself as you solve the puzzle.