I feel like had the technique been “Imagine ice cream tastes like pure turmeric powder”, it would basically be the same technique. I haven’t tried this, but maybe this would work for somebody who is fantasizing about eating ice cream, which causes them to eat too much ice cream.
In that case, I predict people would not have had these (from my perspective) very weird reactions. Imagining random sex scenes feels as meaningful as eating ice cream to me. I could have explained myself much better. Apparently, I did not say precisely enough that I have the problem of having random sexual thoughts. It’s not about imagining having sex with some person you love or anything like that. At least not most of the time. It’s not clear to me that this would actually be better. I think it would not be.
I am not reflectively stable. If don’t want to love somebody because they look a certain way, I want to love somebody for their mind and I am interacting with it.
I am honestly pretty confused by all these reactions. It makes me wonder if this just is not a problem for most people, or if most people have just not realized that this is a problem. I am pretty sure it’s both.
I feel like had the technique been “Imagine ice cream tastes like pure turmeric powder”, it would basically be the same technique.
It would.
In that case, I predict people would not have had these (from my perspective) very weird reactions.
We would. I would, at least, and I predict that others would too because the fundamental reason remains.
I haven’t tried this, but maybe this would work for somebody who is fantasizing about eating ice cream, which causes them to eat too much ice cream.
If you think that you’ve been eating “too much” ice cream, presumably you have reason to believe some undesirable consequences will follow from eating this much ice cream. In this case, you can just imagine this will be the result of eating ice cream. There is no need to live in fantasy land in order to not eat things that reality supports not eating—you just have to exit the fantasy you’re in that is driving you to eat it.
I don’t mean theoretically. While it does get more nuanced, this is the basis of how I relate to my tastes for food, and as a result I don’t have any temptation to eat too much ice cream or anything else I recognize to be unhealthy. I used to, but it no longer appeals to me. Writing this reminds me how delicious liver is, and that I need to eat some more.
I am not reflectively stable.
Right. And these are your opportunities to work towards fixing that :)
I have the problem of having random sexual thoughts. It’s not about imagining having sex with some person you love or anything like that.
I’m not making any assumptions about what kind of sexual thoughts must have prompted this, nor any stance about what kind of sexual thoughts would be appropriate for you. That’s for you to decide with yourself. If you say it’s not working the way you want it to, I believe you. It’s not uncommon.
What I’m pointing out is that you don’t actually need to feed yourself false training data in order to do this, and doing so actively impedes the process of cohering into something resembling reflective stability. Whatever the valid reasons to not do the problem behavior, those can be used to motivate change, and when you do that you get far more interesting and better results.
It’s not as simple as “Here’s something I’m convinced is a valid reason, now will it go away?”, but it is not theoretical either. Integrating one’s sexual drives does change their shape, and this can have quite pronounced effects in ways that you wouldn’t know to anticipate in advance.
Your comments have been very useful to me. I wrote many thousands of words of reflection on this. I realized that I was suppressing my sexual feelings in an unhealthy way. I tried so far 2 ways to integrate them better that failed.
I am a bit more optimistic about the current approach, which tries to allocate specific periods of time where I will allow myself to let my sexual feelings run free, and I aim to do so in a way where they become an extension of non-sexual love instead of this ad-hoc monster that possesses you temporary, where you then regret what you do afterwards.
Good, I’m glad my comments had the effect I was aiming for.
It’s an interesting and fun project for sure. A few notes...
* I wouldn’t expect to get it all figured out quickly, but rather for things to change shape over the course of years. Pieces can change quickly of course, but there’s a lot to figure out and sometimes you need to find yourself in the right experience to have the perspective to see what comes next.
* I’d also caution against putting the cart too far ahead of the horse, even if you have pretty good justification. “Extension of non-sexual love” sounds right, but also just so much weird and unexpected stuff that it’s hard to foresee in sufficient detail that it’s likely that your perspective on what this entails isn’t complete.
* Freedom to explore is freedom to learn, but also freedom to fail—like removing training wheels from a bike so that you can engage with the process of balancing, but also risk falling. Managing this tradeoff can be tricky, especially when the cost of failure gets high.
* “Allocating specific periods of time to run free” reminds me of how I’ve been approaching my daughters developing appetite. Monday through Saturday she has to eat what we make her so that she gets good nutrition and builds familiarity with good foods, and on Sunday’s she’s free to learn exactly how much ice cream is *too* much and otherwise eat whatever she wants. I’m not entirely sure what to think yet and the arbitrariness of it bothers my sense of aesthetics a bit, but I’m relatively happy with how it’s going so far and I’m not really sure how to do it any less arbitrarily in context.
As an update, the 3rd thing I tried also failed. Now I ran out of things to try. The problem is that anything that is non-sexual love seems to be corrupted by sexual love, in a way that makes the non-sexual part worse. E.g. imagine you have a female friend that you like to talk to because she is a good interlocutor. When not talking to her, you might think about what topics would be good to talk about, how to make the conversations better at a meta-level, or how much you enjoy talking to her.
I expect that if you would now start to have sex with that female friend your mind would get corrupted by sexual desire. E.g. instead of thinking about what to discuss in the next meeting, a sexual fantasy would pop into your head.
That seems strictly worse. This is not exactly what happened in my failed attempts number 2 and 3. But I think this example highlights the underlying dynamic that made none of my attempts work out. Attempt number 1 failed because there wasn’t enough love there that you could extend in the first place.
My current strategy is to just not think anything sexual anymore, and be sensitive to any negative emotions that arise. I then plan to use my version of IDC on them to figure out what the subagents that generate the emotions want. So far it seems that to some extent realizing this corruption dynamic has cooled down the sexual part of my mind a bit. But attempt 3 only failed yesterday so this cooling effect might only be temporary.
I wouldn’t expect to get it all figured out quickly
I feel like I have figured out a lot of stuff about this general topic in the last month. Probably more than in the rest of my life so far. Mainly by properly processing my emotions instead of ignoring them using my IDC technique. It feels like I have figured it out to 75% or something like that. And the good thing is that I don’t need to figure it out all the way, to get large benefits. I expect to be much better off now even if I would not do any more optimization.
“Extension of non-sexual love” sounds right, but also just so much weird and unexpected stuff that it’s hard to foresee in sufficient detail that it’s likely that your perspective on what this entails isn’t complete.
I agree that my understanding is not complete. But I think my model is pretty good now. Definitely much better than before, because before I did not have a model. I thought about this point specifically for 5-15 hours. Here is the most important section of my notes on it, based on some analysis I did after watching the first 10 episodes of
A specific instance of the general idea here is that you want to reach a true-best-friends-forever status before feelings of love become involved at all.
I also like the general progression of the relationship between Ryuuji and Taiga. It really seems like the kind of progression that I want. You slowly build up closeness with the other person. Love comes in only at the end, if at all. You make your relationship closer and closer through many things, but none of them are love.
The ideal version of this is getting maximally close in a relationship via some
context, and only once you get maximally close in that context do you extend the
context. And then again you optimize for getting as close as possible in the new
extended context, before extending the context again. And you add things
to the context sorted such that you add the less impactful stuff first. Adding the
component of love to the context should be very late in this chain. I don’t say
last, because I expect in the transhumanist future there would be things that
are even stronger than love.
I feel like this description points roughly in the right direction, but is probably wrong and confused in some details.
I also realize now that this just solves the problem that I have had with romance all along. That is the reason why I did not like how my mind behaved. My mind normally just starts to love somebody immediately, overwriting all of the other aspects of the relationship. This is exactly not what I want love to be. I want love to be the thing that follows after everything else is maximally good. And I want the same to be true for other attributes. E.g. before feeling friendly with somebody, you should like them as much as possible, and get as close to them as possible, without that friendliness feeling there.
It really feels like this is something that generalizes. This is basically a rough sketch of methodology for how to gradually evolve a relationship such that you get the optimal relationship.
The main update that I have had so far is that maybe adding sexuality in the way it exists in my brain right now would always be a downgrade in most relationships. But in principle, you could probably find a version of it, if could effectively selfmodify, that would upgrade most relationships.
As an update, the 3rd thing I tried also failed. Now I ran out of things to try.
I wouldn’t be discouraged. There are a lot of ways to do “the same thing” differently, and I wouldn’t expect a first try success. In particular, I’d expect you to need a lot more time letting yourself “run free”—at least “in sim”—and using that to figure out what exactly it is that you want and how to actually get it without screwing anything else up. Like, “Okay, if I get that, then what?”/”What’s so great about that” and drilling down on that felt sense until something shifts.
Sure took me a while, at least. And I wouldn’t claim to be “finished”
The problem is that anything that is non-sexual love seems to be corrupted by sexual love, in a way that makes the non-sexual part worse. E.g. imagine you have a female friend that you like to talk to because she is a good interlocutor. [...] I expect that if you would now start to have sex with that female friend your mind would get corrupted by sexual desire. E.g. instead of thinking about what to discuss in the next meeting, a sexual fantasy would pop into your head.
How sure are you that this is actually a problem? Is it the hypothetical female friend that has an issue with just focusing on sex as much as you’d be tempted to, or is it a you thing? The former can definitely complicate things, but if it’s the latter I’d be inclined to just run with it and see what happens. It’s a lot harder to get distracted by the possibility of having sex immediately after having it.
My current strategy is to just not think anything sexual anymore, and be sensitive to any negative emotions that arise. I then plan to use my version of IDC on them to figure out what the subagents that generate the emotions want. So far it seems that to some extent realizing this corruption dynamic has cooled down the sexual part of my mind a bit. But attempt 3 only failed yesterday so this cooling effect might only be temporary.
Yeah, that’s the inhibitory side of the equation. Kinda like fasting for a while and realizing that it’s not necessary/helpful/appropriate to panic about being hungry, and chilling out for a bit.
But if you don’t eat sooner or later or make an earnest effort to obtain sufficient food, it might not stay so easy to continue to set the hunger aside.
I feel like I have figured out a lot of stuff about this general topic in the last month. Probably more than in the rest of my life so far.
:) good.
I also realize now that this just solves the problem that I have had with romance all along. That is the reason why I did not like how my mind behaved. My mind normally just starts to love somebody immediately, overwriting all of the other aspects of the relationship. This is exactly not what I want love to be.
This does sound like premature/overattachment. I bet watching what happens to the other aspects of the relationship puts a damper on that impulse.
The ideal version of this is getting maximally close in a relationship via some context, and only once you get maximally close in that context do you extend the context. And then again you optimize for getting as close as possible in the new extended context, before extending the context again. And you add things to the context sorted such that you add the less impactful stuff first. Adding the component of love to the context should be very late in this chain. [...] I want love to be the thing that follows after everything else is maximally good. And I want the same to be true for other attributes. E.g. before feeling friendly with somebody, you should like them as much as possible, and get as close to them as possible, without that friendliness feeling there.
This sounds pretty idealized. “Should” is a red flag word here, as it covers over what “is”, the reasons things are the way they are, and why you want things to be another way instead. In context, “maximally” is too because “maximally” on any dimension rarely matches “optimally”—so whence this motivation, and what is being avoided?
That’s not to say that it’s wrong or misguided as ideals often have important value, but the real world tends to be messy and bring surprises.
I feel like had the technique been “Imagine ice cream tastes like pure turmeric powder”, it would basically be the same technique. I haven’t tried this, but maybe this would work for somebody who is fantasizing about eating ice cream, which causes them to eat too much ice cream.
In that case, I predict people would not have had these (from my perspective) very weird reactions. Imagining random sex scenes feels as meaningful as eating ice cream to me. I could have explained myself much better. Apparently, I did not say precisely enough that I have the problem of having random sexual thoughts. It’s not about imagining having sex with some person you love or anything like that. At least not most of the time. It’s not clear to me that this would actually be better. I think it would not be.
I am not reflectively stable. If don’t want to love somebody because they look a certain way, I want to love somebody for their mind and I am interacting with it.
I am honestly pretty confused by all these reactions. It makes me wonder if this just is not a problem for most people, or if most people have just not realized that this is a problem. I am pretty sure it’s both.
It would.
We would. I would, at least, and I predict that others would too because the fundamental reason remains.
If you think that you’ve been eating “too much” ice cream, presumably you have reason to believe some undesirable consequences will follow from eating this much ice cream. In this case, you can just imagine this will be the result of eating ice cream. There is no need to live in fantasy land in order to not eat things that reality supports not eating—you just have to exit the fantasy you’re in that is driving you to eat it.
I don’t mean theoretically. While it does get more nuanced, this is the basis of how I relate to my tastes for food, and as a result I don’t have any temptation to eat too much ice cream or anything else I recognize to be unhealthy. I used to, but it no longer appeals to me. Writing this reminds me how delicious liver is, and that I need to eat some more.
Right. And these are your opportunities to work towards fixing that :)
I’m not making any assumptions about what kind of sexual thoughts must have prompted this, nor any stance about what kind of sexual thoughts would be appropriate for you. That’s for you to decide with yourself. If you say it’s not working the way you want it to, I believe you. It’s not uncommon.
What I’m pointing out is that you don’t actually need to feed yourself false training data in order to do this, and doing so actively impedes the process of cohering into something resembling reflective stability. Whatever the valid reasons to not do the problem behavior, those can be used to motivate change, and when you do that you get far more interesting and better results.
It’s not as simple as “Here’s something I’m convinced is a valid reason, now will it go away?”, but it is not theoretical either. Integrating one’s sexual drives does change their shape, and this can have quite pronounced effects in ways that you wouldn’t know to anticipate in advance.
Your comments have been very useful to me. I wrote many thousands of words of reflection on this. I realized that I was suppressing my sexual feelings in an unhealthy way. I tried so far 2 ways to integrate them better that failed.
I am a bit more optimistic about the current approach, which tries to allocate specific periods of time where I will allow myself to let my sexual feelings run free, and I aim to do so in a way where they become an extension of non-sexual love instead of this ad-hoc monster that possesses you temporary, where you then regret what you do afterwards.
Good, I’m glad my comments had the effect I was aiming for.
It’s an interesting and fun project for sure. A few notes...
* I wouldn’t expect to get it all figured out quickly, but rather for things to change shape over the course of years. Pieces can change quickly of course, but there’s a lot to figure out and sometimes you need to find yourself in the right experience to have the perspective to see what comes next.
* I’d also caution against putting the cart too far ahead of the horse, even if you have pretty good justification. “Extension of non-sexual love” sounds right, but also just so much weird and unexpected stuff that it’s hard to foresee in sufficient detail that it’s likely that your perspective on what this entails isn’t complete.
* Freedom to explore is freedom to learn, but also freedom to fail—like removing training wheels from a bike so that you can engage with the process of balancing, but also risk falling. Managing this tradeoff can be tricky, especially when the cost of failure gets high.
* “Allocating specific periods of time to run free” reminds me of how I’ve been approaching my daughters developing appetite. Monday through Saturday she has to eat what we make her so that she gets good nutrition and builds familiarity with good foods, and on Sunday’s she’s free to learn exactly how much ice cream is *too* much and otherwise eat whatever she wants. I’m not entirely sure what to think yet and the arbitrariness of it bothers my sense of aesthetics a bit, but I’m relatively happy with how it’s going so far and I’m not really sure how to do it any less arbitrarily in context.
As an update, the 3rd thing I tried also failed. Now I ran out of things to try. The problem is that anything that is non-sexual love seems to be corrupted by sexual love, in a way that makes the non-sexual part worse. E.g. imagine you have a female friend that you like to talk to because she is a good interlocutor. When not talking to her, you might think about what topics would be good to talk about, how to make the conversations better at a meta-level, or how much you enjoy talking to her.
I expect that if you would now start to have sex with that female friend your mind would get corrupted by sexual desire. E.g. instead of thinking about what to discuss in the next meeting, a sexual fantasy would pop into your head.
That seems strictly worse. This is not exactly what happened in my failed attempts number 2 and 3. But I think this example highlights the underlying dynamic that made none of my attempts work out. Attempt number 1 failed because there wasn’t enough love there that you could extend in the first place.
My current strategy is to just not think anything sexual anymore, and be sensitive to any negative emotions that arise. I then plan to use my version of IDC on them to figure out what the subagents that generate the emotions want. So far it seems that to some extent realizing this corruption dynamic has cooled down the sexual part of my mind a bit. But attempt 3 only failed yesterday so this cooling effect might only be temporary.
I feel like I have figured out a lot of stuff about this general topic in the last month. Probably more than in the rest of my life so far. Mainly by properly processing my emotions instead of ignoring them using my IDC technique. It feels like I have figured it out to 75% or something like that. And the good thing is that I don’t need to figure it out all the way, to get large benefits. I expect to be much better off now even if I would not do any more optimization.
I agree that my understanding is not complete. But I think my model is pretty good now. Definitely much better than before, because before I did not have a model. I thought about this point specifically for 5-15 hours. Here is the most important section of my notes on it, based on some analysis I did after watching the first 10 episodes of
Toradora!
.
The main update that I have had so far is that maybe adding sexuality in the way it exists in my brain right now would always be a downgrade in most relationships. But in principle, you could probably find a version of it, if could effectively selfmodify, that would upgrade most relationships.
I wouldn’t be discouraged. There are a lot of ways to do “the same thing” differently, and I wouldn’t expect a first try success. In particular, I’d expect you to need a lot more time letting yourself “run free”—at least “in sim”—and using that to figure out what exactly it is that you want and how to actually get it without screwing anything else up. Like, “Okay, if I get that, then what?”/”What’s so great about that” and drilling down on that felt sense until something shifts.
Sure took me a while, at least. And I wouldn’t claim to be “finished”
How sure are you that this is actually a problem? Is it the hypothetical female friend that has an issue with just focusing on sex as much as you’d be tempted to, or is it a you thing? The former can definitely complicate things, but if it’s the latter I’d be inclined to just run with it and see what happens. It’s a lot harder to get distracted by the possibility of having sex immediately after having it.
Yeah, that’s the inhibitory side of the equation. Kinda like fasting for a while and realizing that it’s not necessary/helpful/appropriate to panic about being hungry, and chilling out for a bit.
But if you don’t eat sooner or later or make an earnest effort to obtain sufficient food, it might not stay so easy to continue to set the hunger aside.
:) good.
This does sound like premature/overattachment. I bet watching what happens to the other aspects of the relationship puts a damper on that impulse.
This sounds pretty idealized. “Should” is a red flag word here, as it covers over what “is”, the reasons things are the way they are, and why you want things to be another way instead. In context, “maximally” is too because “maximally” on any dimension rarely matches “optimally”—so whence this motivation, and what is being avoided?
That’s not to say that it’s wrong or misguided as ideals often have important value, but the real world tends to be messy and bring surprises.