I’m still not 100% sure I understand Val’s definition of Looking, so I’m not quite willing to commit to the claim that it’s the same as Kaj’s definition. But I do think it’s not that hard to square Kaj’s definition with those quotes, so I’ll try to do that.
Kaj’s definition is:
being able to develop the necessary mental sharpness to notice slightly lower-level processing stages in your cognitive processes, and study the raw concepts which then get turned into higher-level cognitive content, rather than only seeing the high-level cognitive content.
Everything you experience, no matter the object, is experienced via your own cognitive processes. When you’re doing math, or talking to a friend, or examining the world, that is an experience you are having, which is being filtered by your cognitive processes, and therefore to which the structure of your mind is relevant.
As Kaj describes, the part of your thought processes you normally have conscious access to are a tiny fragment of what is actually happening. When you practice the skill of making more of it conscious and making finer and finer discriminations in mental experience, you find that there is a lot of information that your conscious mind would normally skip over. This includes plenty of information about “the world”.
So consider the last quote as an example:
A while back I was interacting with a friend of a friend (distant from this community). His demeanor was very forceful as he pushed on wanting feedback about how to make himself more productive. I felt funny about the situation and a little disoriented, so I Looked at him. My sense of him as an experiencing being deepened, and I started noticing sensations in my own body/emotion system that were tagged as “resonant” (which is something I’ve picked up mostly from Circling). I also could clearly see the social dynamics he was playing at. When my mind put the pieces together, I got an impression of a person whose social strategies had his inner emotional world hurting a lot but also suppressed below his own conscious awareness. This gave me some things to test out that panned out pretty on-the-nose.
A fictionalized expansion of that, based on my experiences, might be:
“I was running my usual algorithms for helping someone, but I felt funny about the situation and a little disoriented. In the past I would have just kept trying, or maybe just jumped over to a coping mechanism like trying to get out of the situation. However, I had enough mental sharpness to notice the feeling as it arose, so instead I decided to study my experience of the situation. Specifically, I tried to pay attention to how my mind was constructing the concept of “him”. (Though since my moment-to-moment experience doesn’t distinguish between “him” and “my concept of him”, and since I have no unmediated access to the “him” that is presumably a complex quantum wavefunction, that mental motion might better be described as just “paying attention to my experience of him”, or even “paying attention to him”.) When I did that, I was able to see past the slightly dehumanizing category I was subconsciously putting him in, and was able to pick up on the parts of my mind that were interacting with him on a more human, agent-to-agent level. I was able to notice somatic markers in my body that were part of a process of modeling and empathizing with him, from which I derived both more emotional investment in him and also more information about the social dynamics of the situation, as processed by my system 1, which my conscious mind had been mostly ignoring. I was able to use all of this information to put together an intuitively appealing story about why he was acting this way, and what was going on beneath the surface. This hypothesis immediately suggested some experiments to try, which panned out as the hypothesis predicted.”
Yeah, this is basically how I squared it with Val’s version, too. A few other examples:
The koan thing: I haven’t really done koans, so this might be wrong, but I’d guess that the intent is something like: as you are thinking about the koan, Look at the way that your mind represents the koan and how it struggles with trying to solve the paradox; see if those representations give you any hints about the nature of the answer. (One may note that the experience which triggered my “kensho” was by itself an attempt to answer a paradox, and maybe you could formulate it as a koan, something like “what do you do when you let go of doing”, or whatever.) Certainly I’ve felt like meditation experience has given a slightly better intuition of what exactly it is that koans might be hinting at, though again, I haven’t really tried working with them.
Val also talked about Looking as a way to see the intelligent social web, which also sounds like it’s something directed at the outside not the inside. But after reading his post, I’ve spent some time paying attention to things like… what kinds of narratives and roles do people’s words and positions feel like they are taking, and does my own mind feel like it’s trying to push others into narrative-shaped boxes. The answer was yes. In particular, I started getting the feeling that some of the conflicts I’ve been having with an ex, were because we’re more intimate than friends but more distant than lovers, in a specific way that leaves my brain confused about how exactly I should behave around them; and as a result, one part of my mind has been trying to solve the issue by pushing them away and another part has been trying to solve it by getting closer to them. That’s something that I observed in myself by Looking, but which kind of behavior generalized to the rest of the population would easily get you the kind of social-web stuff Val was talking about. Also, some playing around with me intentionally adopting roles as in the Mythic Mode, and seeing how they influence my behavior and thought patterns, etc.
I’m still not 100% sure I understand Val’s definition of Looking, so I’m not quite willing to commit to the claim that it’s the same as Kaj’s definition. But I do think it’s not that hard to square Kaj’s definition with those quotes, so I’ll try to do that.
Kaj’s definition is:
Everything you experience, no matter the object, is experienced via your own cognitive processes. When you’re doing math, or talking to a friend, or examining the world, that is an experience you are having, which is being filtered by your cognitive processes, and therefore to which the structure of your mind is relevant.
As Kaj describes, the part of your thought processes you normally have conscious access to are a tiny fragment of what is actually happening. When you practice the skill of making more of it conscious and making finer and finer discriminations in mental experience, you find that there is a lot of information that your conscious mind would normally skip over. This includes plenty of information about “the world”.
So consider the last quote as an example:
A fictionalized expansion of that, based on my experiences, might be:
“I was running my usual algorithms for helping someone, but I felt funny about the situation and a little disoriented. In the past I would have just kept trying, or maybe just jumped over to a coping mechanism like trying to get out of the situation. However, I had enough mental sharpness to notice the feeling as it arose, so instead I decided to study my experience of the situation. Specifically, I tried to pay attention to how my mind was constructing the concept of “him”. (Though since my moment-to-moment experience doesn’t distinguish between “him” and “my concept of him”, and since I have no unmediated access to the “him” that is presumably a complex quantum wavefunction, that mental motion might better be described as just “paying attention to my experience of him”, or even “paying attention to him”.) When I did that, I was able to see past the slightly dehumanizing category I was subconsciously putting him in, and was able to pick up on the parts of my mind that were interacting with him on a more human, agent-to-agent level. I was able to notice somatic markers in my body that were part of a process of modeling and empathizing with him, from which I derived both more emotional investment in him and also more information about the social dynamics of the situation, as processed by my system 1, which my conscious mind had been mostly ignoring. I was able to use all of this information to put together an intuitively appealing story about why he was acting this way, and what was going on beneath the surface. This hypothesis immediately suggested some experiments to try, which panned out as the hypothesis predicted.”
Yeah, this is basically how I squared it with Val’s version, too. A few other examples:
The koan thing: I haven’t really done koans, so this might be wrong, but I’d guess that the intent is something like: as you are thinking about the koan, Look at the way that your mind represents the koan and how it struggles with trying to solve the paradox; see if those representations give you any hints about the nature of the answer. (One may note that the experience which triggered my “kensho” was by itself an attempt to answer a paradox, and maybe you could formulate it as a koan, something like “what do you do when you let go of doing”, or whatever.) Certainly I’ve felt like meditation experience has given a slightly better intuition of what exactly it is that koans might be hinting at, though again, I haven’t really tried working with them.
Val also talked about Looking as a way to see the intelligent social web, which also sounds like it’s something directed at the outside not the inside. But after reading his post, I’ve spent some time paying attention to things like… what kinds of narratives and roles do people’s words and positions feel like they are taking, and does my own mind feel like it’s trying to push others into narrative-shaped boxes. The answer was yes. In particular, I started getting the feeling that some of the conflicts I’ve been having with an ex, were because we’re more intimate than friends but more distant than lovers, in a specific way that leaves my brain confused about how exactly I should behave around them; and as a result, one part of my mind has been trying to solve the issue by pushing them away and another part has been trying to solve it by getting closer to them. That’s something that I observed in myself by Looking, but which kind of behavior generalized to the rest of the population would easily get you the kind of social-web stuff Val was talking about. Also, some playing around with me intentionally adopting roles as in the Mythic Mode, and seeing how they influence my behavior and thought patterns, etc.
Yep. I feel understood.