This was a profoundly impactful post and definitely belongs in the review. It prompted me and many others to dive deep into understanding how emotional learnings have coherence and to actually engage in dialogue with them rather than insisting they don’t make sense. I’ve linked this post to people more than probably any other LessWrong post (50-100 times) as it is an excellent summary and introduction to the topic. It works well as a teaser for the full book as well as a standalone resource.
The post makes both conceptual and pragmatic claims. I haven’t exactly crosschecked the models although they do seem compatible with other models I’ve read. I did read the whole book and it seemed pretty sound and based in part on relevant neuroscience. There’s a kind of meeting-in-the-middle thing there where the neuroscience is quite low-level and therapy is quite high-level. I think it’ll be cool to see the middle layers fleshed out a bit.
Just because your brain uses Bayes’ theorem at the neural level and at higher levels of abstraction, doesn’t mean that you consciously know what all of its priors & models are!
And it seems the brain’s basic organization is set up to prevent people from calmly arguing against emotionally intense evidence without understanding it—which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. And it also makes sense that your brain would be able to update under the right circumstances.
I’ve tested the pragmatic claims personally, by doing the therapeutic reconsolidation process using both Coherence Therapy methods & other methods, both on myself & working with others. I’ve found that these methods indeed find coherent underlying structures (eg the same basic structures using different introspective methods, that relate and are consistent) and that accessing those emotional truths and bringing them in contact with contradictory evidence indeed causes them to update, and once updated there’s no longer a sense of needing to argue with yourself. It doesn’t take effort to embody the new knowing.
I guess on another level I’d say that I have the sense that the emotional coherence framework has something important to say about the nature of knowing. It frames all of the perspectives held by conscious and unconscious schemas as “knowings”. The knowings are partial, but this frame (as opposed to “belief”) really respects the first-person experience of what it means to believe something—you don’t think of it as a belief, or something you “think”, it just feels true. So inasmuch as all knowing about the world is partial, there’s a lot to be gained by recognizing that you know things that contradict other things you know. It’s already true, whether you acknowledge it or not.
This framework has profound implications for rational thinking, communication & feedback, topics like akrasia, and there’s a lot of followup work to be done in exploring those implications.
This was a profoundly impactful post and definitely belongs in the review. It prompted me and many others to dive deep into understanding how emotional learnings have coherence and to actually engage in dialogue with them rather than insisting they don’t make sense. I’ve linked this post to people more than probably any other LessWrong post (50-100 times) as it is an excellent summary and introduction to the topic. It works well as a teaser for the full book as well as a standalone resource.
The post makes both conceptual and pragmatic claims. I haven’t exactly crosschecked the models although they do seem compatible with other models I’ve read. I did read the whole book and it seemed pretty sound and based in part on relevant neuroscience. There’s a kind of meeting-in-the-middle thing there where the neuroscience is quite low-level and therapy is quite high-level. I think it’ll be cool to see the middle layers fleshed out a bit.
Just because your brain uses Bayes’ theorem at the neural level and at higher levels of abstraction, doesn’t mean that you consciously know what all of its priors & models are!
And it seems the brain’s basic organization is set up to prevent people from calmly arguing against emotionally intense evidence without understanding it—which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. And it also makes sense that your brain would be able to update under the right circumstances.
I’ve tested the pragmatic claims personally, by doing the therapeutic reconsolidation process using both Coherence Therapy methods & other methods, both on myself & working with others. I’ve found that these methods indeed find coherent underlying structures (eg the same basic structures using different introspective methods, that relate and are consistent) and that accessing those emotional truths and bringing them in contact with contradictory evidence indeed causes them to update, and once updated there’s no longer a sense of needing to argue with yourself. It doesn’t take effort to embody the new knowing.
I guess on another level I’d say that I have the sense that the emotional coherence framework has something important to say about the nature of knowing. It frames all of the perspectives held by conscious and unconscious schemas as “knowings”. The knowings are partial, but this frame (as opposed to “belief”) really respects the first-person experience of what it means to believe something—you don’t think of it as a belief, or something you “think”, it just feels true. So inasmuch as all knowing about the world is partial, there’s a lot to be gained by recognizing that you know things that contradict other things you know. It’s already true, whether you acknowledge it or not.
This framework has profound implications for rational thinking, communication & feedback, topics like akrasia, and there’s a lot of followup work to be done in exploring those implications.