Note the possibility of the other sort of modal confusion: trying to meet your having needs through the being mode. (“I am dry on the inside.”)
I think Vervaeke’s position is that this isn’t much of a problem. That is, the higher levels of development also contain the lower levels of development, and so can see and properly situate the having needs and being needs. If you need to eat to not be hungry, and you need to be a good parent, you might go hungry so that your child has enough to eat, or you might not, depending on your best judgment of the situation. If you need to not have drunk hemlock in order to live, and you need to be true to your principles, you might drink hemlock or you might not, depending on your best judgment of the situation.
[I’ve been reading through The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, which comes up near the end of the lecture series, and the relevant part of his take on religion is that the most important bit is draining the fear of death to make possible regular life (which is everywhere colored by the presence of death). If death is actually infinitely bad, then it doesn’t make sense to get into a car, but how can you live a meaningful life without activities like getting in a car that bear some risk of death?]
But it is still a problem sometimes / you do actually have to use judgment to balance them. A friend of mine, early in the pandemic, was trying to get her community to prepare, and her community responded with something like “you seem like you’re acting out of fear in a way that seems unhealthy,” which I would now characterize as thinking my friend was “focusing on the having-need of safety” instead of “focusing on the being-need of detachment”, or something. I don’t know the full details, but as I understand it they didn’t take sufficient precautions and then COVID spread through the community. (COVID is, of course, in that weird middle zone where this might actually have been fine in retrospect, as I don’t think they had any deaths or long COVID, but I don’t think the reasons they didn’t prepare were sufficiently sensitive to how bad COVID was.)
The modal confusion seems like one of the useful models/concepts Vervaeke shares. I admit I kind of forgot it, but it seemed useful when I first watched the lecture, and it seems useful again now (A large part of why i forgot it could be because i pretty much binged the lectures).
Anyway, your observation is good:
Note the possibility of the other sort of modal confusion: trying to meet your having needs through the being mode.
This sounds like what the buddhists did. Instead of trying to fulfill your having desires, become someone who doesn’t desire them (being mode).
This can be both beneficial and harmful. Minimalism is an example where it’s beneficial. You recognize you are being pumped with having needs/desires that can be relinquished, so you become someone who is satisfied with less.
It could be harmful when the having need isn’t a need that should be relinquished, or you become something you shouldn’t. For example, you have a need for companionship, but for some reason it’s difficult for you to get, so you tell yourself that the other sex is awful and you shouldn’t get involved with them. There probably are fine ways to make relinquish that need (monks do that and they seem fine), but when it doesn’t work like in this example we call that denying your needs, and it makes you miserable.
Your having needs stem from what you are, so it makes sense it would be possible to solve them through transforming yourself, but not so much the other way around (or at all?). I need food because I am human, I can solve that either by getting food or becoming something that doesn’t need food (fact check: Can’t. Growth mindset: Yet). But not every change is an improvement, so attempts to become something different can harm you.
What some Buddhists did. :-) While there are branches of Buddhism that take renunciation as the primary goal, there are also those who just consider it one tool among others (e.g.).
I do know at least 1 person (...maybe 2, from another “bad childhood” case) who completely lost touch with their ability to detect their own hunger, and had to rely on social conventions to remember to eat.
(This person’s childhood was awful. I think they had been stuck in a lot of situations where they couldn’t satisfy their need for food through the “having” frame. While it might be impossible to not need food, it is possible for someone to adjust to not want or think about food much.)
This person was otherwise incredibly well-adjusted*, but the “no sense of hunger” thing stuck.
Do not recommend, btw. It seems to be something that is very hard to unlearn, once acquired. In the absence of other people, “timers” or “actual wooziness” were the shitty secondary indicators these people came to rely on.
* This one was well-adjusted compared to most people, period.**
** Given what he went through, this struck me as an unusual (but pleasant!) surprise. This person’s life was far more difficult than most. But he seemed to be able to view a lot of his tragedies as statistics, and he still found it worth living. Had an incredible knack for making found-family, which probably helped.
Damm… That sounds terrible. Maybe that’s how it’s possible to die of hunger playing video games? I was always confused when I heard these stories, as I can’t imagine a game being so addicting that i don’t notice I’m hungry (Other option is these stories are somehow exaggerated / not real, I haven’t looked into it).
When I did one meal a day intermittent fasting for sufficiently long (4 months, maybe?), I mostly lost my non-physiological sense of hunger (i.e. I wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t eaten in 30 hours or w/e until I was like “huh, my blood sugar is low”). I think I currently have a weak sense of hunger, which is more frequently lonely mouth than “I forgot to eat” or w/e.
My experience of it is mostly positive? Like, I don’t have much trouble eating lunch every day, and have habituated to eating enough at once to sustain me for a day. [People are often surprised the first time they see me with four mealsquares for a meal :P]
On a little further thought: “weaker sense of hunger” could be fine or beneficial for some people, and negative for others.
But some people don’t seem to be able to undo this change, after doing it. So my advice around it defaults to cautionary, largely for that reason. It’s hard to adjust something intelligently after-the-fact, when you can only move a knob easily in 1 direction. (And from my tiny sliver of anecdatums, I think this might be true for at least 1 of the mental-reconfigurations some people can do in this space.)
P.S. “Lonely mouth” is a VASTLY better term (and framing) than “oral fixation.” Why the hell did Western Culture* let Freud do this sort of thing to the joint-metaphor-space?
* Do we have a canonical term for “the anthro for decentralized language canon” yet?**
** I get the feeling that a fun (and incredibly-stupid) anthropomorphizing metaphor could easily exist here. New words as offerings, that can be accepted or rejected by facets of Memesis. Descriptivist linguists as the mad prophets of a broken God. Prescriptivists and conlang-users as her ex-paladins or reformers, fallen to the temptations of lawfulness and cursed with his displeasure. An incomplete reification for “Language as They Are,” in contrast to the platonic construct of an “Orderly Language that Could Be.”
Note the possibility of the other sort of modal confusion: trying to meet your having needs through the being mode. (“I am dry on the inside.”)
I think Vervaeke’s position is that this isn’t much of a problem. That is, the higher levels of development also contain the lower levels of development, and so can see and properly situate the having needs and being needs. If you need to eat to not be hungry, and you need to be a good parent, you might go hungry so that your child has enough to eat, or you might not, depending on your best judgment of the situation. If you need to not have drunk hemlock in order to live, and you need to be true to your principles, you might drink hemlock or you might not, depending on your best judgment of the situation.
[I’ve been reading through The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, which comes up near the end of the lecture series, and the relevant part of his take on religion is that the most important bit is draining the fear of death to make possible regular life (which is everywhere colored by the presence of death). If death is actually infinitely bad, then it doesn’t make sense to get into a car, but how can you live a meaningful life without activities like getting in a car that bear some risk of death?]
But it is still a problem sometimes / you do actually have to use judgment to balance them. A friend of mine, early in the pandemic, was trying to get her community to prepare, and her community responded with something like “you seem like you’re acting out of fear in a way that seems unhealthy,” which I would now characterize as thinking my friend was “focusing on the having-need of safety” instead of “focusing on the being-need of detachment”, or something. I don’t know the full details, but as I understand it they didn’t take sufficient precautions and then COVID spread through the community. (COVID is, of course, in that weird middle zone where this might actually have been fine in retrospect, as I don’t think they had any deaths or long COVID, but I don’t think the reasons they didn’t prepare were sufficiently sensitive to how bad COVID was.)
The modal confusion seems like one of the useful models/concepts Vervaeke shares. I admit I kind of forgot it, but it seemed useful when I first watched the lecture, and it seems useful again now (A large part of why i forgot it could be because i pretty much binged the lectures).
Anyway, your observation is good:
This sounds like what the buddhists did. Instead of trying to fulfill your having desires, become someone who doesn’t desire them (being mode).
This can be both beneficial and harmful. Minimalism is an example where it’s beneficial. You recognize you are being pumped with having needs/desires that can be relinquished, so you become someone who is satisfied with less.
It could be harmful when the having need isn’t a need that should be relinquished, or you become something you shouldn’t. For example, you have a need for companionship, but for some reason it’s difficult for you to get, so you tell yourself that the other sex is awful and you shouldn’t get involved with them. There probably are fine ways to make relinquish that need (monks do that and they seem fine), but when it doesn’t work like in this example we call that denying your needs, and it makes you miserable.
Your having needs stem from what you are, so it makes sense it would be possible to solve them through transforming yourself, but not so much the other way around (or at all?). I need food because I am human, I can solve that either by getting food or becoming something that doesn’t need food (fact check: Can’t. Growth mindset: Yet). But not every change is an improvement, so attempts to become something different can harm you.
What some Buddhists did. :-) While there are branches of Buddhism that take renunciation as the primary goal, there are also those who just consider it one tool among others (e.g.).
Yes, thanks for adding precision to that statement :) I only have a small familiarity with Buddhism.
I do know at least 1 person (...maybe 2, from another “bad childhood” case) who completely lost touch with their ability to detect their own hunger, and had to rely on social conventions to remember to eat.
(This person’s childhood was awful. I think they had been stuck in a lot of situations where they couldn’t satisfy their need for food through the “having” frame. While it might be impossible to not need food, it is possible for someone to adjust to not want or think about food much.)
This person was otherwise incredibly well-adjusted*, but the “no sense of hunger” thing stuck.
Do not recommend, btw. It seems to be something that is very hard to unlearn, once acquired. In the absence of other people, “timers” or “actual wooziness” were the shitty secondary indicators these people came to rely on.
* This one was well-adjusted compared to most people, period.**
** Given what he went through, this struck me as an unusual (but pleasant!) surprise. This person’s life was far more difficult than most. But he seemed to be able to view a lot of his tragedies as statistics, and he still found it worth living. Had an incredible knack for making found-family, which probably helped.
Damm… That sounds terrible. Maybe that’s how it’s possible to die of hunger playing video games? I was always confused when I heard these stories, as I can’t imagine a game being so addicting that i don’t notice I’m hungry (Other option is these stories are somehow exaggerated / not real, I haven’t looked into it).
When I did one meal a day intermittent fasting for sufficiently long (4 months, maybe?), I mostly lost my non-physiological sense of hunger (i.e. I wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t eaten in 30 hours or w/e until I was like “huh, my blood sugar is low”). I think I currently have a weak sense of hunger, which is more frequently lonely mouth than “I forgot to eat” or w/e.
My experience of it is mostly positive? Like, I don’t have much trouble eating lunch every day, and have habituated to eating enough at once to sustain me for a day. [People are often surprised the first time they see me with four mealsquares for a meal :P]
On a little further thought: “weaker sense of hunger” could be fine or beneficial for some people, and negative for others.
But some people don’t seem to be able to undo this change, after doing it. So my advice around it defaults to cautionary, largely for that reason. It’s hard to adjust something intelligently after-the-fact, when you can only move a knob easily in 1 direction. (And from my tiny sliver of anecdatums, I think this might be true for at least 1 of the mental-reconfigurations some people can do in this space.)
P.S. “Lonely mouth” is a VASTLY better term (and framing) than “oral fixation.” Why the hell did Western Culture* let Freud do this sort of thing to the joint-metaphor-space?
* Do we have a canonical term for “the anthro for decentralized language canon” yet?**
** I get the feeling that a fun (and incredibly-stupid) anthropomorphizing metaphor could easily exist here. New words as offerings, that can be accepted or rejected by facets of Memesis. Descriptivist linguists as the mad prophets of a broken God. Prescriptivists and conlang-users as her ex-paladins or reformers, fallen to the temptations of lawfulness and cursed with his displeasure. An incomplete reification for “Language as They Are,” in contrast to the platonic construct of an “Orderly Language that Could Be.”