Here’s some words that are wrong but I think close:
I want to get you to experience enlightenment. Not because enlightenment is valuable, but because it’s hard, and the skill of achieving enlightenment generalises to learning a bunch of other things (that are similarly hard).
Is that sort of what you meant? If not, I’ll tap out for now until your next post.
The main point of contention I have is that I’m not trying to get people to experience enlightenment. I’m trying to have people notice that the fact that (a) enlightenment is a real thing and (b) they can’t understand it via explanations, indicates something really damn important about limits in the kind of epistemology we normally talk about here.
And, it looks like Looking is a way of patching those limitations. So it seems worth considering.
Right. I’ll repeat (in advance of your follow-up post) that while it’s interesting to note that I can’t understanding enlightenment via explanation (and that englightenment is a real thing), this is still not enough to suggest that it’s worth exploring—even if it helps me understand other things like enlightenment.
For example, there are many deep skills where the experience of the skill is not amenable to communication via text, yet the skill and experience are definitely real. As someone who has studied classical music for a decade, I’m not able to convey the experience of playing a Bach prelude to you via text. I can imagine similar things for great sports players, or other experts.
This alone doesn’t (I think) suggest anything too important about epistemology. I await your next post with evidence about why Looking does have something important to say about epistemology!
The analogy breaks down because you don’t need to be able to play a Bach prelude in order to listen to someone else playing it. What would it be like, for you, if that were the world we were in? Can you imagine what it would be like to try to convey to pre-music folk even that music is real and that it might be worth learning how to listen to it? And if that were something you could readily see about how people cannot see something that is so obviously real to you… wouldn’t that cause a more general worry about the epistemic state of the species? For that matter, how would you come to notice things like music that YOU can’t yet understand this way?
The next post isn’t about evidence about why Looking has something important to say about epistemology. It’s a model of how I have done several things like reach kensho, and the model has been refined as a result of what I’ve come to see as a result of Looking. So, I don’t think you’re going to find it scratches that itch. I expect the parts that I can convey that came from Looking won’t themselves seem like they require Looking, so the fact that I had to transcend my own epistemic state to get there won’t be visible. Alas.
Can you imagine what it would be like to try to convey to pre-music folk even that music is real and that it might be worth learning how to listen to it?
This analogy is capturing my current understanding of this post and its various comments pretty well: Looking is like music, in that it is a difficult, voluntaryish act of observing and manipulating hidden mental states. This will result in wireheading, among other things, but it might be sometimes useful. (Note that music is also wireheading, but it can still be useful in narrow contexts.)
FWIW, I’ve come to think that wireheading is an anti-concept as applied to humans. It’s one of those “presume the conclusion” type mental movements. In practice it seems to act like a back door for arguments based on belief residue like the Protestant work ethic / “pleasure is sinful” stuff.
(A little more concretely: It makes sense to talk about some system engaging in wireheading only when there’s a goal imposed from outside the system. It’s like glorified Goodharting. But if the goals come from within the system, it stops being clear what “wireheading” means. On the inside it might feel like “Oh, I just found a vastly easier way to get what I want — and what I want wasn’t what I thought I wanted!” Without an external evaluation criterion, that actually just becomes correct.)
With that said, I think I intuit what you mean by calling music and Looking “wireheading”. I don’t mean to dismiss that. Stuff like, if you meditate enough to get Great Insights™ such that you don’t bother to eat food anymore and you die, that seems like a pretty dramatic failure and kind of throws those “insights” into question.
An interesting fact came to my mind; music that affects one’s mental state is forbidden in Islam.
Perhaps the reason this theme of “sinful pleasure” keeps repeating is the observation that pleasure is a reward signal that does not quite match the utility functions of the conscious mind. At least, that has always been the key motivator of this idea subspace to me.
Oh! If I followed you, that’s much clearer.
Here’s some words that are wrong but I think close:
Is that sort of what you meant? If not, I’ll tap out for now until your next post.
That is damn close, yes.
The main point of contention I have is that I’m not trying to get people to experience enlightenment. I’m trying to have people notice that the fact that (a) enlightenment is a real thing and (b) they can’t understand it via explanations, indicates something really damn important about limits in the kind of epistemology we normally talk about here.
And, it looks like Looking is a way of patching those limitations. So it seems worth considering.
Right. I’ll repeat (in advance of your follow-up post) that while it’s interesting to note that I can’t understanding enlightenment via explanation (and that englightenment is a real thing), this is still not enough to suggest that it’s worth exploring—even if it helps me understand other things like enlightenment.
For example, there are many deep skills where the experience of the skill is not amenable to communication via text, yet the skill and experience are definitely real. As someone who has studied classical music for a decade, I’m not able to convey the experience of playing a Bach prelude to you via text. I can imagine similar things for great sports players, or other experts.
This alone doesn’t (I think) suggest anything too important about epistemology. I await your next post with evidence about why Looking does have something important to say about epistemology!
Well… your epistemic state makes sense…
*sigh*
Two points:
The analogy breaks down because you don’t need to be able to play a Bach prelude in order to listen to someone else playing it. What would it be like, for you, if that were the world we were in? Can you imagine what it would be like to try to convey to pre-music folk even that music is real and that it might be worth learning how to listen to it? And if that were something you could readily see about how people cannot see something that is so obviously real to you… wouldn’t that cause a more general worry about the epistemic state of the species? For that matter, how would you come to notice things like music that YOU can’t yet understand this way?
The next post isn’t about evidence about why Looking has something important to say about epistemology. It’s a model of how I have done several things like reach kensho, and the model has been refined as a result of what I’ve come to see as a result of Looking. So, I don’t think you’re going to find it scratches that itch. I expect the parts that I can convey that came from Looking won’t themselves seem like they require Looking, so the fact that I had to transcend my own epistemic state to get there won’t be visible. Alas.
This analogy is capturing my current understanding of this post and its various comments pretty well: Looking is like music, in that it is a difficult, voluntaryish act of observing and manipulating hidden mental states. This will result in wireheading, among other things, but it might be sometimes useful. (Note that music is also wireheading, but it can still be useful in narrow contexts.)
Cool.
FWIW, I’ve come to think that wireheading is an anti-concept as applied to humans. It’s one of those “presume the conclusion” type mental movements. In practice it seems to act like a back door for arguments based on belief residue like the Protestant work ethic / “pleasure is sinful” stuff.
(A little more concretely: It makes sense to talk about some system engaging in wireheading only when there’s a goal imposed from outside the system. It’s like glorified Goodharting. But if the goals come from within the system, it stops being clear what “wireheading” means. On the inside it might feel like “Oh, I just found a vastly easier way to get what I want — and what I want wasn’t what I thought I wanted!” Without an external evaluation criterion, that actually just becomes correct.)
With that said, I think I intuit what you mean by calling music and Looking “wireheading”. I don’t mean to dismiss that. Stuff like, if you meditate enough to get Great Insights™ such that you don’t bother to eat food anymore and you die, that seems like a pretty dramatic failure and kind of throws those “insights” into question.
An interesting fact came to my mind; music that affects one’s mental state is forbidden in Islam.
Perhaps the reason this theme of “sinful pleasure” keeps repeating is the observation that pleasure is a reward signal that does not quite match the utility functions of the conscious mind. At least, that has always been the key motivator of this idea subspace to me.