I do think there are things in this general topic area that are worth understanding, but the original post and most of the comments have been pretty useless to anyone trying to understand who doesn’t already. Some could even be seen as taunting people over their lack of understanding, which be perfectly frank, I find obnoxious. So I’ll try to give a quick overview of how I understand this while hopefully avoiding those pitfalls.
Take something like learning to wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow at a time, or whistle. These can’t be explained in words, but words and other stimuli can make it more likely that you’ll stumble onto the correct action. Innate aptitude is probably a factor, too.
If you think of your current level of happiness or euphoria (to pick a simple example) as the output of a function with various inputs, some of these inputs can be changed through voluntarily mental actions that similarly can’t be directly explained in words and aren’t obvious. Things like meditating long enough with correct technique can cause people to stumble across the way to do this. Some of the inputs can be changed about as easily as wiggling your ears, while others can be much more difficult or apparently impossible, maybe analogous to re-learning motor functions after a stroke.
My guess as to what’s being referred to as “Looking” amounts to having enough experience with this sort of activity that the mental state you happen to be in right now—even though it still colors everything you think and experience to more-or-less the same extent as ever—having directly confirmed that it can be voluntarily changed given the appropriate effort, stops seeming as particularly special, or magical, or all-encompassing as it used to, and that’s the source of the “looking up from the screen” and “getting out of the car” metaphors.
(I mean “mental state” in an expansive way, including everything from your current mood to your beliefs about the nature of the universe to whether or not you’re currently hallucinating.)
As for impressive feats, or the “cake,” I’m pretty sure they aren’t really all that impressive. There’s low-hanging fruit that can be personally fulfilling but not particularly outwardly impressive, and the high-hanging fruit mostly amounts to an odd form of wireheading that leaves you outwardly functional but without a sense of self or of caring about anything.
This is one of the most useful comments in this thread; there’s not much to say in response to most of it, except “that makes a lot of sense, thank you”. So instead, here’s some commentary to a part of this that I object to:
Take something like learning to wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow at a time, or whistle. These can’t be explained in words, but words and other stimuli can make it more likely that you’ll stumble onto the correct action.
You may not be able to explain how to do these things in words. But you can certainly explain in words what these things are (for one of them, you just did)! And certainly, if you wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow, or whistle, that you are doing something unusual (and what you are doing) will be blindingly obvious, without you even needing to point it out.
And so it would be a perfectly unsurprising scenario, if you and I were having an ordinary conversation, and suddenly you whistled (suppose I have never heard anyone whistle before):
clone of saturn:whistles
Said: Whoa! What… what did you just do?? You just made, like, a weird sound!
clone of saturn: yeah, it’s called ‘whistling’
Said: Gosh! Can you do it again?
clone of saturn:whistles again
Said: … fascinating! How did you do that? Could I do that??
clone of saturn: well… it might be hard to explain…
Said: Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I have no idea how I’d go about doing that…! That sure is a really cool thing you can do, though…
Obviously, this is nothing even remotely like the ‘Looking’ scenario, where not only are we merely told that its practitioners can do cool and unusual things (instead of being shown those things, even when we ask them to show us), but the alleged things they can do are so vague and poorly-explained that it’s unclear how we would even notice that they were doing those things, even if we were in their physical presence.
Edit: Of course you’ve already explained the reason for this disanalogy—why no impressive feats may be produced by those who are able to ‘Look’. I’m merely calling attention to it—that it’s not merely a “can’t explain in words, because hard-to-verbalize procedural knowledge” situation, of the ‘whistling’ or ‘ear-wiggling’ sort.
I do think there are things in this general topic area that are worth understanding, but the original post and most of the comments have been pretty useless to anyone trying to understand who doesn’t already. Some could even be seen as taunting people over their lack of understanding, which be perfectly frank, I find obnoxious. So I’ll try to give a quick overview of how I understand this while hopefully avoiding those pitfalls.
Take something like learning to wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow at a time, or whistle. These can’t be explained in words, but words and other stimuli can make it more likely that you’ll stumble onto the correct action. Innate aptitude is probably a factor, too.
If you think of your current level of happiness or euphoria (to pick a simple example) as the output of a function with various inputs, some of these inputs can be changed through voluntarily mental actions that similarly can’t be directly explained in words and aren’t obvious. Things like meditating long enough with correct technique can cause people to stumble across the way to do this. Some of the inputs can be changed about as easily as wiggling your ears, while others can be much more difficult or apparently impossible, maybe analogous to re-learning motor functions after a stroke.
My guess as to what’s being referred to as “Looking” amounts to having enough experience with this sort of activity that the mental state you happen to be in right now—even though it still colors everything you think and experience to more-or-less the same extent as ever—having directly confirmed that it can be voluntarily changed given the appropriate effort, stops seeming as particularly special, or magical, or all-encompassing as it used to, and that’s the source of the “looking up from the screen” and “getting out of the car” metaphors.
(I mean “mental state” in an expansive way, including everything from your current mood to your beliefs about the nature of the universe to whether or not you’re currently hallucinating.)
As for impressive feats, or the “cake,” I’m pretty sure they aren’t really all that impressive. There’s low-hanging fruit that can be personally fulfilling but not particularly outwardly impressive, and the high-hanging fruit mostly amounts to an odd form of wireheading that leaves you outwardly functional but without a sense of self or of caring about anything.
This is one of the most useful comments in this thread; there’s not much to say in response to most of it, except “that makes a lot of sense, thank you”. So instead, here’s some commentary to a part of this that I object to:
You may not be able to explain how to do these things in words. But you can certainly explain in words what these things are (for one of them, you just did)! And certainly, if you wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow, or whistle, that you are doing something unusual (and what you are doing) will be blindingly obvious, without you even needing to point it out.
And so it would be a perfectly unsurprising scenario, if you and I were having an ordinary conversation, and suddenly you whistled (suppose I have never heard anyone whistle before):
clone of saturn: whistles
Said: Whoa! What… what did you just do?? You just made, like, a weird sound!
clone of saturn: yeah, it’s called ‘whistling’
Said: Gosh! Can you do it again?
clone of saturn: whistles again
Said: … fascinating! How did you do that? Could I do that??
clone of saturn: well… it might be hard to explain…
Said: Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I have no idea how I’d go about doing that…! That sure is a really cool thing you can do, though…
Obviously, this is nothing even remotely like the ‘Looking’ scenario, where not only are we merely told that its practitioners can do cool and unusual things (instead of being shown those things, even when we ask them to show us), but the alleged things they can do are so vague and poorly-explained that it’s unclear how we would even notice that they were doing those things, even if we were in their physical presence.
Edit: Of course you’ve already explained the reason for this disanalogy—why no impressive feats may be produced by those who are able to ‘Look’. I’m merely calling attention to it—that it’s not merely a “can’t explain in words, because hard-to-verbalize procedural knowledge” situation, of the ‘whistling’ or ‘ear-wiggling’ sort.