I like this comment because it’s a relatively clear articulation of the central thing you seem to be frustrated about here, which is that you think that Val could show you the cake but is refusing to for some perverse reason that you can’t fathom.
I think the cake analogy is a very poor fit for what’s happening here. Everyone knows what a cake is. I don’t have to teach you anything to show you a cake; I just show it to you and you’ve instantly understood that what you’re looking at is a cake. This is very different from trying to show someone what “enlightenment” looks like, whatever that means. At a minimum “enlightenment” involves something screwy happening with ontologies, so there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to “see” an example of “enlightenment” just by staying in your particular ontology.
Back to the cell phone world: Alex texts me demanding that I show him an example of what looking up looks like. What can I do? I can text him a picture of a person looking up from a phone. What’s his referent for that? Other pictures he’s seen, on his screen, of people looking up from their phones. Nothing he hasn’t seen a million times, on his screen. Alex thinks the thing he is asking me to do is easy, and if he’s right it’s not in the sense that he thinks.
To the contrary; it seems very easy to show me ‘enlightenment’.
How? Well, just move down another level of meta: what is enlightenment good for? What does it let you do, in the real world? etc.—all the things I have been asking. Show us that thing! (Or, really, several such things.)
Having done this, you will thereby have demonstrated ‘enlightenment’, and can then proceed up to the meta-meta-level of “the technique you used to achieve enlightenment”.
Analogously, suppose what I claimed to discover was not a new baking technique, but a new process of culinary experimentation which might be used to discover new baking techniques.
So first you’d exhibit a cake, and we’d all have a bite and agree that it’s delicious. Then you’d show us a pie, and we’d all have a forkful and agree that it, too, is delicious. You would then bring out a tray of cookies, and we’d all have one and judge them to be delicious.
Then you’d tell us about the novel baking techniques you used in the process of baking the cake, the pie, and the cookies, respectively. We’d all be impressed (and would, at this point, have no doubt that the techniques work, as the taste of your delicious baked goods still lingered in our mouths).
And then you’d tell us all about your fascinating new experimental process.
(As an aside, note that this analogy is not even wholly fictional; this is, in fact, basically how Christopher Kimball operates.)
So however long the chain of meta is, that leads to the actual cake, said cake is still the first thing I want to see.
Valentine did list things in the above comment that are fancy.
The core reason why he didn’t put that in the initial post is likely that most of the people who are experts at “teaching” this have strong beliefs against doing this and believe that it isn’t helpful.
According to that conception enlightment isn’t about doing or more trying to do more but about doing less. If you give someone a fancy list they are going to try harder and as a result are less likely to make progress.
Valentine did list things in the above comment that are fancy.
As I say in another comment, Valentine has certainly told us all about how great the cake is. What he hasn’t done is provide us with any. All of his listed examples are benefits that are (a) self-reported, unverified, and possibly unverifiable[1], and (b) very, very vague.
[1] Though even third-party testimony, if sufficiently diverse and credible, would be a good start.
According to that conception enlightment isn’t about doing or more trying to do more but about doing less.
What does “doing less” mean, in this context? (And why might I want to “do less”?)
If you take the person who looks at the cell phone that’s an active act. I think “Look up” is a bit the wrong frame. It’s more helpful to say “Stop focusing on your phone” (even if the person still has no concept for that).
If the person stops focusing on the phone they start to notice things that aren’t on the phone but that’s not an active act. It starts happening when the person stop distracting themselves by looking at the phone.
Of course, the problem there—from a “public epistemology” perspective—is that we only have Valentine’s word on this. Now, you may be tempted to indignation at this comment; am I calling Valentine a liar? But I have no need to do any such thing; quite apart from the possibility of knowing mendacity, there is the far thornier problem that what we’ve got is an account only from Valentine’s perspective—who knows how his ex sees things? What would they say, if questioned on the matter—especially in private? We don’t know.
This, of course, is why I suggested that a diverse lineup of credible third-party testimonials might be of use (though not, by themselves, conclusive) in convincing us of the value of Valentine’s ‘attainment’ (as seems to be the proper term of art).
(Certainly there is also the fact that when one engages in public seeking after truth, and public debate of it, a higher grade of evidence is often needed than simply “I did this amazing thing—just trust me”. Not always—sometimes one’s word suffices—but in such cases as this, it does not; we all know the old saw about extraordinary claims…)
Re: your comments about “doing less”, and about why it’s unhelpful to list accomplishments or benefits: RainbowSpacedancer has provided a satisfying response, and I am inclined to agree with them (i.e., if you don’t tell me what the point of any of it is, then this is merely frustrating for me, and saying that it’s ‘unhelpful’ to explain to me why I should put in the effort is… well… unhelpful).
How is Val’s first response to Ben not what you are looking for?
For some actual cake, here’s what it can give you, based on my experience of what it has given me:
An example: there was a philosophical line of thought originating from lesswrong about the nature of reality. Enlightenent will allow you to see how there is a discrepancy between the use of the word reality in accordance with this theory and the original use of the word. It will then allow you to actually look at what is going on, what is the nature of the original use, and what is the nature of the new use is, and see how that conversation went off the rails. It will show you how to come back to the start and stay grounded, rather than being stuck in a pragmatist metaphysical nihilism. And this is why “nothing is probability 1, therefore real things are all ‘out there’ in the inaccessible territory and these ‘things’ are just my experiential maps in my brain which corresponds to things in the territory” is mistaken, just a model, and subordinate to the fact that you already always have been in the world and this is necessarily a precondition of your doing philosophy.
You will see that “you are your brain” is false and “you are a product of your brain” is an extremely narrow model that is useful in only a very constrained context. You will see how “everything is made of atoms” is a similarly very narrow model. These models are both way overrated in their use, very overrepresented in communities like this, and very not fundamental.
Things like your personal bubble, which is real and just there, despite it “not being made of atoms” and it “being just something that your brain injects into your map”, will not be invisible by default. You will gain handles on many fundamental parts of you that were previously hidden behind a theory that doesn’t account for them or calls them unreal.
I must say I am perplexed by comments such as this. (Don’t get me wrong—I’m not singling you out in any way; this is only the latest in a pattern.)
In what world does any of what you wrote, there, constitute anything like: (a) concrete actionable knowledge or understanding; or (b) actual, real-world benefits?
It feels strange to do this, given how vague all of this is, but let’s try to tackle at least your first bullet point:
there was a philosophical line of thought originating from lesswrong about the nature of reality
To what line of thought to do you refer? Are you making reference to the concept of the “map-territory distinction”? Or something else?
Enlightenent will allow you to see how there is a discrepancy between the use of the word reality in accordance with this theory and the original use of the word
What is this discrepancy? Tell us about it!
It will then allow you to actually look at what is going on
And? What is actually going on?
what is the nature of the original use, and what is the nature of the new use is
So what are they?
and see how that conversation went off the rails.
Yes? And how did it?
It will show you how to come back to the start and stay grounded, rather than being stuck in a pragmatist metaphysical nihilism.
What is “pragmatist metaphysical nihilism”? Who is stuck in it, and what does it mean to be stuck in it?
And this is why “nothing is probability 1, therefore real things are all ‘out there’ in the inaccessible territory and these ‘things’ are just my experiential maps in my brain which corresponds to things in the territory” is mistaken, just a model, and subordinate to the fact that you already always have been in the world and this is necessarily a precondition of your doing philosophy.
Who disagrees with this? I can get this out of the Sequences. I did get this out of the Sequences!
The other stuff is more of the same.
In short, what you seem to be giving me here, is (at best!) a promise of cake; a sort of “cake coupon”, if you will—“redeemable for one (1) cake”.
Well, I’d like to redeem it! Your cake sounds delicious. You’ve whetted my appetite! I would love to have a slice. In other words: you’re telling me “I’ve understood the truth about X”. Fine. Good. I’m listening. What is the truth about X?
(Note, please, that these do not sound like very impressive truths or understandings, even if they are real. But they would be something, at least! That’s better than nothing… and so I look forward to actually seeing this alleged something, rather than simply being told of its existence.)
People tend to get exactly the quoted part out of the sequences somehow, not the rejection of it. I didn’t explain it there because it takes a lot of writing to do so, but I will do it here.
The image we are given in the sequences, in map and territory and in epistemology 101, is that light hits a thing, reflects off of your shoe, hits your retina, a signal is sent down some optical pathways, and you experience seeing your shoe. Then, note that there are many parts of this pathway that can be interrupted. So you have the reality out there, and the person experiencing in there, and there is a fundamental disconnect between the territory out there, and the maps in the brain in there. Since there is always a chance for somthing interfering with that connection, nothing can be probability 1. From this you conclude that any thing that you experience is just some image your brain conjures up from sensory stimulus. Those things that you experience are not real, and are only maps of the actual real things out there in ineffable reality.
Looking allows you to see that the entire thing I just described is just a model—an image. In going through that whole thing, Look at how you are shrinking back inside of your head and reasoning not about reality, but an image of a person in an image of reality, reasoning about that, and then trying to put yourself in that image. Notice how in doing this, the thing that comes up for you when you say reality with regards to this model is that image, in your mind, which you see that image of a person as being inside of. Notice that this image is not in fact reality.
Notice further that there is now a disconnect between what correct use of the word “real” is in accordance to this model, versus how we used to use “real”. Hold up a spoon. Is that spoon real? No. It is just my mind’s representation of some actual real spoon “out there” in real external reality. Notice here how when you make that shift to think of the “actual real spoon,” you’ve again shifted to referencing an idea and not a thing. But of course the correct answer is “yes, that is in fact a real spoon,” and that is in line of the original meaning of real.
So we’ve gone off the rails in our analysis of reality. First, what went wrong in our analysis? Diagnosis requires some skill in Looking. Without Looking, you only have access to the logic of the ideas presented. You must Look to see what actual movements you are doing to think in this way. The issue is when generating the image of a man in reality, there is little correspondence between what you are thinking of as “reality” and how the realness algorithm works in the inside of the man you are imagining. You are not reflecting on how you yourself are generating this image of a reality but sort of naively taking that generated image of reality as being reality. Because of this disconnect between what is being called reality and how reality is felt on the inside, there is a disconnect between our new concept of realness and the old one.
Second, what do you do from here? To rectify the above image, note that there has already been a realness algorithm which the man feels on the inside, and that these fundamental things are the basis on which we start to do philosophy in the first place. We started with an implicit skill of already being able to deal with reality. We are always already in the world with our concerns and our projects. Looking is in part the skill of figuring out ‘how the algorithm feels’ on the inside (which is itself sort of backwards, since the algorithm is just a model, and how it feels on the inside is what was there all along). It makes possible the skill of keeping reality in your mind, and noticing when you swap it for an idea. Flap your arms about, and notice where you are doing this. If you keep this thing (it is a thing, not an idea) as your referent of “reality”, it will be much harder to go off the rails in doing such an analysis of real.
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Now for personal bubbles (this and action fields are things I posted on Val’s facebook post)
You have a personal bubble, which is just there, despite it “not being made of atoms” and it “just being a thing your brain inserts into your map”. Not being able to Look can get you caught in these or similar models, instead of having the capacity to actually look at the personal bubble which is just there. You can feel its edges when someone is too close to you. It’s that area where you get this sort of buzzing clenching feeling when a stranger is in it. You can see other’s personal bubbles when you seen a guy leaning too close in to a girl and her putting her arm across her stomach and leaning away—he is “too close”. That judgement comes from your already there understanding of her having a personal bubble. This is ontologically as primitive as recognizing something as being a chair.
As a primitive action—ontologically on the same level as wiggling your fingers—you can project or contract your personal bubble. You will find that your body moves when you do this (this is a large portion of the Status chapter in Impro). Doing this when public speaking will help you project your voice through the room. You can also do it on the bus or train and see how other people move in relation to you. You can do other actions like welcome someone into it. Like at a party where someone is standing at the edge of a group of people having a conversation, you can take an action at the level of personal bubbles to invite them into the conversation. You can even use this as a weapon. Think of the bully, who stands tall, chest out, arms open, hands open pointed forwards. He walks at the victim and stands very close to him. The victim closes up on himself and tries to back away. Without any physical contact, the bully is assaulting the victim with his personal bubble by projecting it all over his victim (try to do this to a willing volunteer, or get someone to do this to you. Feel what happens).
There is a whole manifold of such things, which can be shown to someone without the skill of Looking, but cannot be found without the skill of Looking. There is so much of this stuff, and to an extent there are going to be elements of this that are unique to you, that it is untennable to have all of these things pointed out to you.
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Here is another thing in the manifold of such things, which I call action fields. This is something I only was able to find on my own once I had the skill of Looking. Try to think of how you would have discovered these things on your own, including noticing that they were there in the first place.
Try to put your hand on a fire or hot stove element. Actually start initiating the action rather than nipping the action at the bud with “I don’t want to do it”. You should find something like there being a slippery force field around that dangerous thing. You move your hand towards it, and your hand sort of wants to slip around that thing. Of course this field isn’t “physical”, but it is nonetheless there.
When you are walking somewhere, notice that there is a flow that is carrying you from here to there. Notice that the primitive action that you’ve decided on is to get to that location, not something like move this leg like this, move this leg like that. Notice how stopping that flow from here to there, just for the sake of stopping, takes some effort.
Notice how at any given moments, there are these tunnels. These spaces through the action field that you can travel. Things like “reach for that mug” and “say something at that person” and “look at that thing”. Notice that not all actions have walls around them like in my first example of the fire. Things which you know how to do but don’t want to have a wall. Things which you don’t know how to do just don’t have a tunnel. Consider the difference between the impossibility of your jumping off the edge of that building (a wall) and your doing a backflip (assuming you can’t do one).
It is here where action and choice happens and where some of the more direct levers are.
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If you want, I can also go through what “everything is made of atoms” and “you are just a brain” actually means, and why they are not very useful and not fundamental.
The image we are given in the sequences… [snipped]
It would be a drastic understatement to say that what you wrote in that paragraph is a ludicrous misunderstanding of what Eliezer wrote. I could call it a ‘distortion’, but it’s more like literally the opposite of what the Sequences say. (The part about probability in particular makes me question whether we read the same posts or, indeed, live in the same reality; suffice it to say that you certainly did not understand what was said in the Sequences about probability theory.)
The entirety of that section of your comment consists of setting up and then knocking down this frankly shocking strawman of Eliezer’s ideas; this is then mixed with a rather amateurish recapitulation of selected bits of Enlightenment-era and 20th-century philosophy (which have been beaten to death by generations of analytic philosophers—who, even in those cases where they haven’t solved these issues, have said some much more significant and useful things about them then you have). Most of it, frankly, is not even wrong.
In the second section, you take some facts about how non-verbal signals work in human social interaction—facts which are, no doubt, interesting, true, and useful—and construct out of them some bizarre ontology. (The claim that understanding how non-verbal cues/gestures/signals work and how they interact with social interactions “cannot be found without the skill of Looking” is also laughable.)
Of course body language is a real thing. But who would disagree? The idea that any of this is somehow novel, or can only be perceived by people who’ve acquired some skill so special that it needs to be capitalized, is absurd. The “personal bubble” is a certainly potentially useful abstraction. You have, inexplicably, chosen to say some manifestly absurd things about it. About that, I’ll just say “mind projection fallacy” and leave it at that.
(comment continued from parent, due to character limit)
The final section is yet more of the mind projection fallacy. Phenomenology is interesting, and your contributions to it are… not novel, of course, but written in a clear enough way to be of interest to investigators. Yet you have again chosen not only to construct a bizarre ontology out of a combination of fairly straightforward phenomenological facts and what are apparently some highly-idiosyncratic-at-best elements of your mental experience; you’ve also gone on to make the again outlandish claim that none of it is discernible without your capital-letter skill.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I mean that in all sincerity and wholly sans sarcasm; I appreciate it, as I know that responding to skeptical internet strangers is a mostly-thankless task. Few people would attempt to respond in so concrete a fashion (and indeed almost no one else has), so know that I very much value the effort that you took to respond, and the product of that effort.
That you have responded with enough specificity and detail for me to be able to draw satisfyingly (though not nearly totally) definite conclusions, is icing on the (sadly, only proverbial) cake. So, again: thank you.
P.S. I upvoted dsatan’s comment, as I very much endorse encouraging detailed, specific responses to critical inquiries, here on LW.
What I went through is what I’ve seen many people get from the sequences. While I’m knocking down a strawman (insofar as what Eliezer’s vague writing actually pinpoints a single discernable position), it is a strawman that many people actually believe. There are people who literally say beliefs are the same thing as probabilities or probability distributions after having read the sequences. I would be interested in how you’d summarize it though.
Yes, what I did was the same thing that a lot of enlightenment philosophers did, though sloppily since I’ve given you a quick and dirty argument. A lot of what they said is right. Analytic philosophers have mostly gone off the rails in the same way. There are some notable exceptions in the neopragmatist school, and late Wittgenstein, and probably a few other exceptions. I’ve had someone schooled in analytic philosophy be utterly baffled by me askng what the relation between his criterion for realness has to do with the act of holding up a spoon, looking at it and feeling it, and having the immediate impression if it being there, real, and in the world. It’s stuck in ideas. Notice that a lot of what I’m doing is pointing at things. I’m not purely giving a chain of logical deductions. Since you seem philosophically inclined, go read Heidegger.
As for your comments about the other two sections, look at my other comment with clarifications. I mean that you need Looking actually noticing the underlying phenomena of these things in the first place (not the associated behaviours, but the actual things) without having someone point them out to you. It’s not necessary to analyze people’s behaviour and body language or notice that in the first place. People have the implicit skill of actually dealing with personal bubbles and notice this idea of space, but that doesn’t mean having a conscious awareness directed at the actual structure of the phenomena associated to it. People don’t automatically have access to the handles that let them project their personal bubble, they just do it or not instinctually.
What I am doing is not talking about facts about human social interaction, but what it is like to actually experience that, and the structures you find in your experience. This slipping up to the level of behaviours and social interactions is exactly the failure to Look. I am trying to use those facts to evoke the phenomenon so that I can point your attention to it. Of course body language is a real thing, but what constitutes the feeling of being attacked when someone is, for lack of a better phrase, all up in your face? Yes, we can talk about the behaviours of the people involved or talk at a high up abstract level of “status” and “dominance” but how did we understand that status and dominance in the first place? What does it feel like to be in either scenario? What does it feel like to have a personal bubble? These things correspond to or come from very primordial phenomena. These are the gears that make status and dominance intelligable, and constitutes your ability to work with them.
My description of action fields using “tunnels” and “walls” points to actual phenomena which you can explore and my language is meant to only be evocative. Go out and initiate the action of putting your hand on a hot stove and see what this feels like. Consider the action of clapping your hands—feel the possiblity of it. Consider doing a backflip—feel what it is like for this to not be possible, or an intelligble action. What does it feel like to be prevented from taking your pants down in public? What is preventing you? That what is a thing, which is there and you can pay attention to it directly. It is not an idea. Without Looking, there are no ideas already there to point you at the thing. You have to have the ability to navigate the experiential primitives on your own.
dsatan : Hey, via Looking I can see X, it is really cool
Said Achmiz : I can’t see X and it’s absurd what you say about X.
For dsatan personal bubble is likely as much of an abstraction as calling a spoon a spoon is an abstraction.
You can directly experience the spoon by touching it or seeing it and you don’t have any corresponding way to perceive the personal bubble. On the other hand, dsatan has that direct experience of the personal bubble.
I personally had times where I had a clear direct perception of it. With that direct experience it feels as concrete as the spoon.
It’s likely not impossible to develop that perception without Looking but Looking makes it a lot easier to develop that perception.
A few points. The metaphysical nihilism I was referring to is taking the logical step of realizing that that image of a man in an image of reality is just a model, that everything you think of is just in your head, so everything is just a model. “real” becomes meaningless—dereferenced from any particular thing.
Second, to be clearer about what actually requires Looking, you need Looking to some extent to understand what I’m doing in the analysis of reality (though I think I’m getting better at forcing people to Look so that they can understand it, but with regards to looking, that’s like someone holding up your bike and guiding you along instead of you balancing for yourself). Looking is necessary to come up with such an analysis in the first place. Looking is not necessary to understand the personal bubble, or to understand action fields. Looking is necessary to see them for the first time without someone pointing them out to you, and is very helpful in analyzing their structure.
(edit) Furthermore, a good chunck of people who read what I just wrote will be mislead as to what Looking is.
The fundamental issue is that we are communicating in language, the medium of ideas, so it is easy to get stuck in ideas. The only way to get someone to start looking, insofar as that is possible, is to point at things using words, and to get them to do things. This is why I tell you to do things like wave your arms about or attack someone with your personal bubble or try to initiate the action of touching a hot stove element.
(edit) Lastly, there is this so much to Look at. I am mostly Looking at Things, and The World. There is this whole realm of People which I have almost no experience Looking at and have only scratched the surface of with personal bubbles. Val is much more experienced at this, which is why he is able to do some of the things that he claims and I am not. It is also why I haven’t actually tried to point at that sort of stuff. But it is still there, waiting for us to Look at it.
This turns out to be mostly addressed in my response to your other comment, so I don’t have very much to say here. I’ll comment only that as far as I can tell, you’re knocking down strawmen and solving problems that don’t exist. That those problems would not require any ‘Looking’ to solve even if they did exist adds insult to injury.
Like, who has this “metaphysical nihilism” problem? Surely not anyone who has read and understood the Sequences (nor much of anyone else)… no doubt there are some people out there, who are confused in this particular way—but that’s true of almost any sort of confusion, no matter how silly. So if I don’t have the problem you cite, nor ever did have it, and can hardly even comprehend the confusion that would lead anyone to have it, what am I to think of your holding up your alleged solution to this non-problem as something which is unattainable without this particular unusual skill you vaunt?
In any case—to reiterate what I say in my other comment: thank you for taking the time to respond; I really do appreciate it.
What is the metaphyiscal nihilism problem… Do you know the person Shminux? (edit) He’s a lesswronger from way back. He avoids unsig “real”, and “true”, and things of that sort for this very reason. His catchphrase is “it’s just a model”.
And I’m quite confident that you’ve misinterpreted or don’t understand about 70% of what I’ve said, but your rejection is all “this is absurd” so it’s hard to get anything to grab onto there.
(Edit) the entirety of my response was a mistake. You’ve dratically missed the point of all that I’ve said, missed what I was doing and latched on to only the propositional content of those sentences that I wrote. Now you’ve taken this misunderstanding as licence to reject the whole thing.
You’ve dratically missed the point of all that I’ve said, missed what I was doing and latched on to only the propositional content of those sentences that I wrote.
This seems important. Please elaborate!
What were you doing? Wasn’t it “trying to answer my questions”, “saying things you consider to be true”, etc.?
That’s what I usually assume people do, when they post comments in response to things I’ve asked. If you weren’t doing that, then (a) why on earth not, and (b) what were you doing?
a) I was saying things that I believed, but not all things you can do with words is to state true propositions. “Go wash the dishes” is not true. “Go to the kitchen and see what’s in the sink” is also not true. That is a type error. There is also a sense in which “the thing in the sink is what I call a knork” is not true if “knork” is not a word used by anyone but the person who is telling you that that think is a “knork”—if there is no larger social context for that to contradict. That last one is what I’m doing with action fields.
b) It was getting you to do things, and then pointing at the things that you subsequently experienced in doing those things. I’m trying to get you to have the realization that those things are things that are there. I’m also trying to get you to realize that those things are actually important.
So for example, the personal bubble is a thing, which is just there in the same sense as chairs are just there, which (almost) everyone has, and (almost) eveeryone has an implicit understanding of in the sense that they know how to navigate personal space and they can understand when people are too close. But they don’t stop and actually look at the thing which is the personal bubble itself and look at its experiential mechanics.
To give you an understanding of what I mean by just there, I have to point. It is not an idea so I can’t just tell you what it means, I have to get you to see it. Actually go and pick up an object somewhere around you (actually do this, don’t imagine what it’s like to do this). See how you have this immediate impression of how it being there, existing, in your hand. This immediate impression is what I mean by just there. Notice how it itself is not an idea that I can communicate to you in language. It’s something that I have to get you to experience and then point to that experience.
Back to the personal bubble, if you actually do the things that I said, which are designed to make the personal bubble come out and be tangible, you will notice that it is just there. It is just there in the same sense as whatever object you picked up was just there, but it is hard to see, like say how a certain sort of waterfowl might be hard to spot in tall brush unless you have lots of experience hunting it and spotting it.
(edit) If you were to immediately do something like say “that’s just a socially constructed phenomenon” or “that’s just something injected into my map by my brain”, you are turning your attention away from that thing and to an idea. Notice what those two “explanations” do in your mind. Where it leads your attention, and the way it gets you conceiving of things. Notice the movements in your mind between actually experiencing the thing and giving that explanation. Notice how I am again mostly getting you to do something, not making truth claims.
I really really don’t think you have. And I really think that this interaction has been a net negative for you. You have not demonstrated at any point that you have understood me. You have, in fact, failed to engage with me at all save to dismiss what I’ve written out of hand and call it absurd. Do you realize how stressful this interaction has been for me? How I am putting myself out there and you just attack in poor faith? I don’t really get the sense that you are even trying to understand me. This comment of yours makes me feel dismissed, as if you think I’m just some crazy person and you want to get away and ignore me but do so politely.
I do not feel that everything has been said, that there are things I need to clarify. So I will:
My critique of that train of thought originating from lesswrong comes in two parts. The first is interpretation, the second is turning inwards and looking at the gears of how that interpretation actually works and behaves in the mind. To look at what it actually does rather than just what it says.
The interpretive part is this (slightly edited):
The image we are given in the sequences, in map and territory and in epistemology 101, is that light hits a thing, reflects off of your shoe, hits your retina, a signal is sent down some optical pathways, and you experience seeing your shoe. Note that there are many parts of this causal pathway that can be disrupted or corrupted. So you have the reality out there, and the person experiencing in their brain, and there is always a possibility for a causal disconnect between the territory out there, and the maps in the brain.
Since there is always a possibility of somthing interfering with that causal connection, in a way that is not observable from the perspective of the agent, no belief should have probability 1. Since believing something being real is a belief, we must conclude that the probability of something being real cannot be 1. So when we look at something, even though we have the immediate and unshakeable experience of there being a real thing, that is simply the brain truncating the precision on the probability to 1, creating a map out of sensory input. Those things that you experience are not actually the real thing, they are only the brain’s maps of the actual real things out there in inaccessible reality.
That is the whole of the interpretive part. The rest is taking that whole interpretation as an object and look at what it actually does in the mind. Looking at the gears of the interpretation. If you think I’ve misinterpreted the sequences, then it is these two paragraphs here that you must talk about, not any of the rest, because the rest is not interpretation. The way to argue against the rest of that (given agreement about interpretation here) is to actually look at what it is doing in the mind and demonstrate that it is different from my account.
I would be happy to take this conversation to another venue (public or private, at your option; I have a blog whose comments section we can use, or perhaps IRC; email is also an option). For various reasons, LW is not ideal for continuing this discussion.
If it helps, your explanations made perfect sense to me, like plain English. So thank you for putting yourself out there; you gave me and others something to chew on.
(I wrote a comment and it disappeared. Hopefully it doesn’t show up along with this one)
How is Val’s first response to Ben not satisfactory?
But here are a few things that it’s done for me:
Things like your personal bubble will not be invisible by default. Your personal bubble is real and just there despite it “not being made of atoms” and it “just being a thing your brain injects into your map”. Looking will give you handles and sensors relevant to all sorts of different parts of you, like those handles and sensors relevant to controlling your personal bubble, feeling your personal bubble, and seeing and feeling other people’s personal bubbles. Without it, you might be stuck in a theory that doesn’t account for your personal bubble and it remains hidden, or it calls your personal bubble unreal and makes it hard to look at. As another example, the energy flows of feng shui are a perceptual primitive related to good movement and flows of attention.
There is a philosophical line of thougth originating on lesswrong which comes up with a certain notion of what reality is. Looking will allow you to notice that the use of the word “real” in accordance to this notion of real is very different from the original use of the word real. Looking will allow you to see what is actually going on in this new meaning of real, and see how it has gone off the rails. Looking will allow you to find your way back to the original meaning and keep you grounded in coming to a reflective understanding of the nature of realness so that you don’t go off the rails again. And that’s why “nothing is probability 1, therefore real things are all ‘out there’ in the inaccessible territory and these ‘things’ are just my experiential maps in my brain which corresponds to things in the territory” is just a model, mistaken, and is both subordinate and at odds with the fact that you have always already been in the world, and this fact is necessarily a precondition to your doing philosophy.
You will see how “you are a brain” is wrong and “you are a product of your brain” is a model with extremely narrow and context specific use. You will notice the same about “everything is made of atoms.” These models are way overrated and overrepresented in this and similar communities, and are by no means fundamental to anything but the practice of certain scientific disciplines.
Quick meta note: neither comment of yours has disappeared, but once there are more than 100 comments in a post, they don’t all render at first (because rendering more than 100 comments at once is a bit bandw idth intensive). You have to click the “load more” at the top of the comments to see your new one.
I think you aren’t taking the cell phone world metaphor seriously enough. Moving down meta levels in this way will not help me explain anything to Alex about what looking up from his phone is like, except insofar as it involves doing “whispering into ear”-type stuff, which we’ve discussed elsewhere.
This seems like an odd reply. Suppose Alex were to ask what good comes of being able to do this “look up” thing, and you said “I can’t explain to you what looking up is”. Alex would see that as a non sequitur.
Similarly, suppose you launched into an explanation of your baking technique, and I asked you for a slice of cake. Does “serving you a slice of cake won’t help me explain the baking technique” make sense as a reply? It does not.
Where is the cake? Damn the explanations, man; show me the cake!
Making a photo of a cake and sending it to Alex doesn’t help him to learn about the cake that he would see if he would look up.
Alex might come up with a lot of arguments why he has much more beautiful pictures on his smart phone that look much tasty but that will be besides the point because cakes are for eating and not for looking at pictures of them.
Looking up from your phone provides experimentally verifiable “superpowers”—you can, for example, communicate with other Lookers Up via invisible gestures without texting them. Telepathy!
Maybe that’s a flaw in the analogy. But Valentine does claim real-world benefits, such as superhuman insight into psychology (as do other people who describe themselves as enlightened.) Maybe those aren’t “the point”, but demonstrating them convincingly would go a long way towards convincing the rest of us that there is a point and we just can’t see it.
The Buddha himself didn’t just say “trust me guys”, he supposedly did a bunch of miracles using his enlightenment-granted powers.
<b>To the contrary; it seems very easy to show me ‘enlightenment’. How? Well, just move down another level of meta: what is enlightenment good for? What does it let you do, in the real world? etc.—all the things I have been asking. Show us that thing! (Or, really, severalsuch things.)</b>
Somethings can be their own good, they don’t have to be “good for” something.
The author didn’t tell you enlightenment is a tool.
They said enlightenment is a kind of insight / experience.
Heck, even if it did have utility, for the person who experienced it (e.g. now I feel better about myself, my depression is gone, whatever), there doesn’t need to be any actual cake to show to others, much less one they can use without going through said experience themselves.
It’s like humor or experiencing a great musical piece.
If you don’t get it, there’s no cake to show you. Explanation of the joke’s mechanism or the music piece’s harmony or other aspects wouldn’t do much either.
Look. I’ve explained the area where you would have to Look in order to see the cake. I’ve warned you that if I give you cake you won’t understand it and will even claim it is unreal or doesn’t count. I’ve then given you cake and you insist that it is unreal or doesn’t count, and then continue to demand cake, along with increasing hostility toward me for not trying.
If you imagine the world in which I’m actually just correct, you can understand where I might find this a bit annoying. And I imagine that you’re trying to push on the possibility that I’m not right, that I’m just deluded or something… but even if you’re right about that, please notice that from my vantage point you aren’t speaking whatsoever to what I’m saying. You’re still asking for which app to open in order to get an understanding of the amazing benefits of this “looking up” thing.
And I knew that this would be the kind of result if I tried to argue y’all into seeking enlightenment. So that’s not what I was aiming to do. Instead, I tried to say “Hey, notice this gaping hole in epistemology that this communication problem suggests exists?” But, once again, you zero in on “I won’t look at this epistemological problem until you prove to me that you have cake.” And I’m left kind of throwing my hands in the air because YOUR FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND THE EPISTEMOLOGY PROBLEM LEAVES YOU LITERALLY INCAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING WHY YOU CAN’T UNDERSTAND CAKE.
Yelling at me to give you cake CANNOT HELP with this. And no matter what I do, you are going to continue to insist that I’m mysteriously withholding cake.
People who have had kensho don’t have this communication problem with me. I gesture toward the thing and they go “Yep.” I give them examples of cake and they give me details they’ve noticed about it themselves. Sometimes I point out types of cake they’ve never thought of before, and then they goddamn Look, and then we can talk about it in ways that clearly make sense to both of us.
And they vividly relate to this problem of not being able to give people like you cake — because the whole goddamn point is that you have no clue what cake is!
So there’s obviously something real going on here, and pretty much all of us are standing over here saying “Yes this is really hugely goddamn important” (at least to each other — quite a few have given up trying to say anything about this to pre-kensho folk)… and I’m left staring at this impressive epistemic gap and going “Huh. Seems like even if the thing can’t be conveyed, at least the gap can? Surely people who care about truth will care about there being something that has this many people saying this strongly that it’s important and that their methods of truth-seeking are too low-dimensional to handle.”
…and then you demand cake.
*sigh*
Should we go through a laundry list of things you’ll dismiss for one reason or another? How you can cultivate a kind of resolve that is different but vastly more meaningful than anything you can yet understand? How you can actually see the way in which you have intrinsic and unshakable value, leaving you with a sense of perfect worth and a way of having room to actually goddamn care about people? How you can have roads to removing self-deception at a vastly deeper level than you were ever capable of even noticing before? How you can actually get what the generator of the original insights was that allowed the scientific revolution to happen in the first place? How you can learn to really actually pay attention to that small still voice of knowing that you always always always regret not paying attention to sooner?
Hold on, hold on. Clarify something for me, please. You say:
I’ve then given you cake
To make sure that I understand you properly, could you specify which thing that you’ve said is this ‘cake’ you’ve given me? (No need to re-explain it; simply quote yourself. I just want to be certain I know what to respond to.)
How you can cultivate a kind of resolve that is different but vastly more meaningful than anything you can yet understand?
What good is it?
How you can actually see the way in which you have intrinsic and unshakable value, leaving you with a sense of perfect worth and a way of having room to actually goddamn care about people?
What good is it? (Also, what does it mean to not have this?)
How you can have roads to removing self-deception at a vastly deeper level than you were ever capable of even noticing before?
What particular self-deception have you removed? What new things have you discovered, thereby? Give some concrete examples, please.
How you can actually get what the generator of the original insights was that allowed the scientific revolution to happen in the first place?
What new insights have you generated, thereby? Give some concrete examples, please.
How you can learn to really actually pay attention to that small still voice of knowing that you always always always regret not paying attention to sooner?
What good is it? What have you been able to know, thereby? Give some concrete examples, please.
No? None of that is allowed?
All of that is allowed! I’d love to hear about concrete examples of what all of this stuff is good for! What has any of it helped you accomplish? What has it helped you learn, discover, create, invent, understand? Tell us! This sounds like exactly the sort of thing I’m after.
I like this comment because it’s a relatively clear articulation of the central thing you seem to be frustrated about here, which is that you think that Val could show you the cake but is refusing to for some perverse reason that you can’t fathom.
I think the cake analogy is a very poor fit for what’s happening here. Everyone knows what a cake is. I don’t have to teach you anything to show you a cake; I just show it to you and you’ve instantly understood that what you’re looking at is a cake. This is very different from trying to show someone what “enlightenment” looks like, whatever that means. At a minimum “enlightenment” involves something screwy happening with ontologies, so there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to “see” an example of “enlightenment” just by staying in your particular ontology.
Back to the cell phone world: Alex texts me demanding that I show him an example of what looking up looks like. What can I do? I can text him a picture of a person looking up from a phone. What’s his referent for that? Other pictures he’s seen, on his screen, of people looking up from their phones. Nothing he hasn’t seen a million times, on his screen. Alex thinks the thing he is asking me to do is easy, and if he’s right it’s not in the sense that he thinks.
To the contrary; it seems very easy to show me ‘enlightenment’.
How? Well, just move down another level of meta: what is enlightenment good for? What does it let you do, in the real world? etc.—all the things I have been asking. Show us that thing! (Or, really, several such things.)
Having done this, you will thereby have demonstrated ‘enlightenment’, and can then proceed up to the meta-meta-level of “the technique you used to achieve enlightenment”.
Analogously, suppose what I claimed to discover was not a new baking technique, but a new process of culinary experimentation which might be used to discover new baking techniques.
So first you’d exhibit a cake, and we’d all have a bite and agree that it’s delicious. Then you’d show us a pie, and we’d all have a forkful and agree that it, too, is delicious. You would then bring out a tray of cookies, and we’d all have one and judge them to be delicious.
Then you’d tell us about the novel baking techniques you used in the process of baking the cake, the pie, and the cookies, respectively. We’d all be impressed (and would, at this point, have no doubt that the techniques work, as the taste of your delicious baked goods still lingered in our mouths).
And then you’d tell us all about your fascinating new experimental process.
(As an aside, note that this analogy is not even wholly fictional; this is, in fact, basically how Christopher Kimball operates.)
So however long the chain of meta is, that leads to the actual cake, said cake is still the first thing I want to see.
Valentine did list things in the above comment that are fancy.
The core reason why he didn’t put that in the initial post is likely that most of the people who are experts at “teaching” this have strong beliefs against doing this and believe that it isn’t helpful.
According to that conception enlightment isn’t about doing or more trying to do more but about doing less. If you give someone a fancy list they are going to try harder and as a result are less likely to make progress.
As I say in another comment, Valentine has certainly told us all about how great the cake is. What he hasn’t done is provide us with any. All of his listed examples are benefits that are (a) self-reported, unverified, and possibly unverifiable[1], and (b) very, very vague.
[1] Though even third-party testimony, if sufficiently diverse and credible, would be a good start.
What does “doing less” mean, in this context? (And why might I want to “do less”?)
Would you say that he provided the ex with cake?
If you take the person who looks at the cell phone that’s an active act. I think “Look up” is a bit the wrong frame. It’s more helpful to say “Stop focusing on your phone” (even if the person still has no concept for that).
If the person stops focusing on the phone they start to notice things that aren’t on the phone but that’s not an active act. It starts happening when the person stop distracting themselves by looking at the phone.
Sure.
Of course, the problem there—from a “public epistemology” perspective—is that we only have Valentine’s word on this. Now, you may be tempted to indignation at this comment; am I calling Valentine a liar? But I have no need to do any such thing; quite apart from the possibility of knowing mendacity, there is the far thornier problem that what we’ve got is an account only from Valentine’s perspective—who knows how his ex sees things? What would they say, if questioned on the matter—especially in private? We don’t know.
This, of course, is why I suggested that a diverse lineup of credible third-party testimonials might be of use (though not, by themselves, conclusive) in convincing us of the value of Valentine’s ‘attainment’ (as seems to be the proper term of art).
(Certainly there is also the fact that when one engages in public seeking after truth, and public debate of it, a higher grade of evidence is often needed than simply “I did this amazing thing—just trust me”. Not always—sometimes one’s word suffices—but in such cases as this, it does not; we all know the old saw about extraordinary claims…)
Re: your comments about “doing less”, and about why it’s unhelpful to list accomplishments or benefits: RainbowSpacedancer has provided a satisfying response, and I am inclined to agree with them (i.e., if you don’t tell me what the point of any of it is, then this is merely frustrating for me, and saying that it’s ‘unhelpful’ to explain to me why I should put in the effort is… well… unhelpful).
How is Val’s first response to Ben not what you are looking for?
For some actual cake, here’s what it can give you, based on my experience of what it has given me:
An example: there was a philosophical line of thought originating from lesswrong about the nature of reality. Enlightenent will allow you to see how there is a discrepancy between the use of the word reality in accordance with this theory and the original use of the word. It will then allow you to actually look at what is going on, what is the nature of the original use, and what is the nature of the new use is, and see how that conversation went off the rails. It will show you how to come back to the start and stay grounded, rather than being stuck in a pragmatist metaphysical nihilism. And this is why “nothing is probability 1, therefore real things are all ‘out there’ in the inaccessible territory and these ‘things’ are just my experiential maps in my brain which corresponds to things in the territory” is mistaken, just a model, and subordinate to the fact that you already always have been in the world and this is necessarily a precondition of your doing philosophy.
You will see that “you are your brain” is false and “you are a product of your brain” is an extremely narrow model that is useful in only a very constrained context. You will see how “everything is made of atoms” is a similarly very narrow model. These models are both way overrated in their use, very overrepresented in communities like this, and very not fundamental.
Things like your personal bubble, which is real and just there, despite it “not being made of atoms” and it “being just something that your brain injects into your map”, will not be invisible by default. You will gain handles on many fundamental parts of you that were previously hidden behind a theory that doesn’t account for them or calls them unreal.
I must say I am perplexed by comments such as this. (Don’t get me wrong—I’m not singling you out in any way; this is only the latest in a pattern.)
In what world does any of what you wrote, there, constitute anything like: (a) concrete actionable knowledge or understanding; or (b) actual, real-world benefits?
It feels strange to do this, given how vague all of this is, but let’s try to tackle at least your first bullet point:
To what line of thought to do you refer? Are you making reference to the concept of the “map-territory distinction”? Or something else?
What is this discrepancy? Tell us about it!
And? What is actually going on?
So what are they?
Yes? And how did it?
What is “pragmatist metaphysical nihilism”? Who is stuck in it, and what does it mean to be stuck in it?
Who disagrees with this? I can get this out of the Sequences. I did get this out of the Sequences!
The other stuff is more of the same.
In short, what you seem to be giving me here, is (at best!) a promise of cake; a sort of “cake coupon”, if you will—“redeemable for one (1) cake”.
Well, I’d like to redeem it! Your cake sounds delicious. You’ve whetted my appetite! I would love to have a slice. In other words: you’re telling me “I’ve understood the truth about X”. Fine. Good. I’m listening. What is the truth about X?
(Note, please, that these do not sound like very impressive truths or understandings, even if they are real. But they would be something, at least! That’s better than nothing… and so I look forward to actually seeing this alleged something, rather than simply being told of its existence.)
People tend to get exactly the quoted part out of the sequences somehow, not the rejection of it. I didn’t explain it there because it takes a lot of writing to do so, but I will do it here.
The image we are given in the sequences, in map and territory and in epistemology 101, is that light hits a thing, reflects off of your shoe, hits your retina, a signal is sent down some optical pathways, and you experience seeing your shoe. Then, note that there are many parts of this pathway that can be interrupted. So you have the reality out there, and the person experiencing in there, and there is a fundamental disconnect between the territory out there, and the maps in the brain in there. Since there is always a chance for somthing interfering with that connection, nothing can be probability 1. From this you conclude that any thing that you experience is just some image your brain conjures up from sensory stimulus. Those things that you experience are not real, and are only maps of the actual real things out there in ineffable reality.
Looking allows you to see that the entire thing I just described is just a model—an image. In going through that whole thing, Look at how you are shrinking back inside of your head and reasoning not about reality, but an image of a person in an image of reality, reasoning about that, and then trying to put yourself in that image. Notice how in doing this, the thing that comes up for you when you say reality with regards to this model is that image, in your mind, which you see that image of a person as being inside of. Notice that this image is not in fact reality.
Notice further that there is now a disconnect between what correct use of the word “real” is in accordance to this model, versus how we used to use “real”. Hold up a spoon. Is that spoon real? No. It is just my mind’s representation of some actual real spoon “out there” in real external reality. Notice here how when you make that shift to think of the “actual real spoon,” you’ve again shifted to referencing an idea and not a thing. But of course the correct answer is “yes, that is in fact a real spoon,” and that is in line of the original meaning of real.
So we’ve gone off the rails in our analysis of reality. First, what went wrong in our analysis? Diagnosis requires some skill in Looking. Without Looking, you only have access to the logic of the ideas presented. You must Look to see what actual movements you are doing to think in this way. The issue is when generating the image of a man in reality, there is little correspondence between what you are thinking of as “reality” and how the realness algorithm works in the inside of the man you are imagining. You are not reflecting on how you yourself are generating this image of a reality but sort of naively taking that generated image of reality as being reality. Because of this disconnect between what is being called reality and how reality is felt on the inside, there is a disconnect between our new concept of realness and the old one.
Second, what do you do from here? To rectify the above image, note that there has already been a realness algorithm which the man feels on the inside, and that these fundamental things are the basis on which we start to do philosophy in the first place. We started with an implicit skill of already being able to deal with reality. We are always already in the world with our concerns and our projects. Looking is in part the skill of figuring out ‘how the algorithm feels’ on the inside (which is itself sort of backwards, since the algorithm is just a model, and how it feels on the inside is what was there all along). It makes possible the skill of keeping reality in your mind, and noticing when you swap it for an idea. Flap your arms about, and notice where you are doing this. If you keep this thing (it is a thing, not an idea) as your referent of “reality”, it will be much harder to go off the rails in doing such an analysis of real.
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Now for personal bubbles (this and action fields are things I posted on Val’s facebook post)
You have a personal bubble, which is just there, despite it “not being made of atoms” and it “just being a thing your brain inserts into your map”. Not being able to Look can get you caught in these or similar models, instead of having the capacity to actually look at the personal bubble which is just there. You can feel its edges when someone is too close to you. It’s that area where you get this sort of buzzing clenching feeling when a stranger is in it. You can see other’s personal bubbles when you seen a guy leaning too close in to a girl and her putting her arm across her stomach and leaning away—he is “too close”. That judgement comes from your already there understanding of her having a personal bubble. This is ontologically as primitive as recognizing something as being a chair.
As a primitive action—ontologically on the same level as wiggling your fingers—you can project or contract your personal bubble. You will find that your body moves when you do this (this is a large portion of the Status chapter in Impro). Doing this when public speaking will help you project your voice through the room. You can also do it on the bus or train and see how other people move in relation to you. You can do other actions like welcome someone into it. Like at a party where someone is standing at the edge of a group of people having a conversation, you can take an action at the level of personal bubbles to invite them into the conversation. You can even use this as a weapon. Think of the bully, who stands tall, chest out, arms open, hands open pointed forwards. He walks at the victim and stands very close to him. The victim closes up on himself and tries to back away. Without any physical contact, the bully is assaulting the victim with his personal bubble by projecting it all over his victim (try to do this to a willing volunteer, or get someone to do this to you. Feel what happens).
There is a whole manifold of such things, which can be shown to someone without the skill of Looking, but cannot be found without the skill of Looking. There is so much of this stuff, and to an extent there are going to be elements of this that are unique to you, that it is untennable to have all of these things pointed out to you.
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Here is another thing in the manifold of such things, which I call action fields. This is something I only was able to find on my own once I had the skill of Looking. Try to think of how you would have discovered these things on your own, including noticing that they were there in the first place.
Try to put your hand on a fire or hot stove element. Actually start initiating the action rather than nipping the action at the bud with “I don’t want to do it”. You should find something like there being a slippery force field around that dangerous thing. You move your hand towards it, and your hand sort of wants to slip around that thing. Of course this field isn’t “physical”, but it is nonetheless there.
When you are walking somewhere, notice that there is a flow that is carrying you from here to there. Notice that the primitive action that you’ve decided on is to get to that location, not something like move this leg like this, move this leg like that. Notice how stopping that flow from here to there, just for the sake of stopping, takes some effort.
Notice how at any given moments, there are these tunnels. These spaces through the action field that you can travel. Things like “reach for that mug” and “say something at that person” and “look at that thing”. Notice that not all actions have walls around them like in my first example of the fire. Things which you know how to do but don’t want to have a wall. Things which you don’t know how to do just don’t have a tunnel. Consider the difference between the impossibility of your jumping off the edge of that building (a wall) and your doing a backflip (assuming you can’t do one).
It is here where action and choice happens and where some of the more direct levers are.
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If you want, I can also go through what “everything is made of atoms” and “you are just a brain” actually means, and why they are not very useful and not fundamental.
It would be a drastic understatement to say that what you wrote in that paragraph is a ludicrous misunderstanding of what Eliezer wrote. I could call it a ‘distortion’, but it’s more like literally the opposite of what the Sequences say. (The part about probability in particular makes me question whether we read the same posts or, indeed, live in the same reality; suffice it to say that you certainly did not understand what was said in the Sequences about probability theory.)
The entirety of that section of your comment consists of setting up and then knocking down this frankly shocking strawman of Eliezer’s ideas; this is then mixed with a rather amateurish recapitulation of selected bits of Enlightenment-era and 20th-century philosophy (which have been beaten to death by generations of analytic philosophers—who, even in those cases where they haven’t solved these issues, have said some much more significant and useful things about them then you have). Most of it, frankly, is not even wrong.
In the second section, you take some facts about how non-verbal signals work in human social interaction—facts which are, no doubt, interesting, true, and useful—and construct out of them some bizarre ontology. (The claim that understanding how non-verbal cues/gestures/signals work and how they interact with social interactions “cannot be found without the skill of Looking” is also laughable.)
Of course body language is a real thing. But who would disagree? The idea that any of this is somehow novel, or can only be perceived by people who’ve acquired some skill so special that it needs to be capitalized, is absurd. The “personal bubble” is a certainly potentially useful abstraction. You have, inexplicably, chosen to say some manifestly absurd things about it. About that, I’ll just say “mind projection fallacy” and leave it at that.
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The final section is yet more of the mind projection fallacy. Phenomenology is interesting, and your contributions to it are… not novel, of course, but written in a clear enough way to be of interest to investigators. Yet you have again chosen not only to construct a bizarre ontology out of a combination of fairly straightforward phenomenological facts and what are apparently some highly-idiosyncratic-at-best elements of your mental experience; you’ve also gone on to make the again outlandish claim that none of it is discernible without your capital-letter skill.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I mean that in all sincerity and wholly sans sarcasm; I appreciate it, as I know that responding to skeptical internet strangers is a mostly-thankless task. Few people would attempt to respond in so concrete a fashion (and indeed almost no one else has), so know that I very much value the effort that you took to respond, and the product of that effort.
That you have responded with enough specificity and detail for me to be able to draw satisfyingly (though not nearly totally) definite conclusions, is icing on the (sadly, only proverbial) cake. So, again: thank you.
P.S. I upvoted dsatan’s comment, as I very much endorse encouraging detailed, specific responses to critical inquiries, here on LW.
What I went through is what I’ve seen many people get from the sequences. While I’m knocking down a strawman (insofar as what Eliezer’s vague writing actually pinpoints a single discernable position), it is a strawman that many people actually believe. There are people who literally say beliefs are the same thing as probabilities or probability distributions after having read the sequences. I would be interested in how you’d summarize it though.
Yes, what I did was the same thing that a lot of enlightenment philosophers did, though sloppily since I’ve given you a quick and dirty argument. A lot of what they said is right. Analytic philosophers have mostly gone off the rails in the same way. There are some notable exceptions in the neopragmatist school, and late Wittgenstein, and probably a few other exceptions. I’ve had someone schooled in analytic philosophy be utterly baffled by me askng what the relation between his criterion for realness has to do with the act of holding up a spoon, looking at it and feeling it, and having the immediate impression if it being there, real, and in the world. It’s stuck in ideas. Notice that a lot of what I’m doing is pointing at things. I’m not purely giving a chain of logical deductions. Since you seem philosophically inclined, go read Heidegger.
As for your comments about the other two sections, look at my other comment with clarifications. I mean that you need Looking actually noticing the underlying phenomena of these things in the first place (not the associated behaviours, but the actual things) without having someone point them out to you. It’s not necessary to analyze people’s behaviour and body language or notice that in the first place. People have the implicit skill of actually dealing with personal bubbles and notice this idea of space, but that doesn’t mean having a conscious awareness directed at the actual structure of the phenomena associated to it. People don’t automatically have access to the handles that let them project their personal bubble, they just do it or not instinctually.
What I am doing is not talking about facts about human social interaction, but what it is like to actually experience that, and the structures you find in your experience. This slipping up to the level of behaviours and social interactions is exactly the failure to Look. I am trying to use those facts to evoke the phenomenon so that I can point your attention to it. Of course body language is a real thing, but what constitutes the feeling of being attacked when someone is, for lack of a better phrase, all up in your face? Yes, we can talk about the behaviours of the people involved or talk at a high up abstract level of “status” and “dominance” but how did we understand that status and dominance in the first place? What does it feel like to be in either scenario? What does it feel like to have a personal bubble? These things correspond to or come from very primordial phenomena. These are the gears that make status and dominance intelligable, and constitutes your ability to work with them.
My description of action fields using “tunnels” and “walls” points to actual phenomena which you can explore and my language is meant to only be evocative. Go out and initiate the action of putting your hand on a hot stove and see what this feels like. Consider the action of clapping your hands—feel the possiblity of it. Consider doing a backflip—feel what it is like for this to not be possible, or an intelligble action. What does it feel like to be prevented from taking your pants down in public? What is preventing you? That what is a thing, which is there and you can pay attention to it directly. It is not an idea. Without Looking, there are no ideas already there to point you at the thing. You have to have the ability to navigate the experiential primitives on your own.
The core dynamic here is:
dsatan : Hey, via Looking I can see X, it is really cool
Said Achmiz : I can’t see X and it’s absurd what you say about X.
For dsatan personal bubble is likely as much of an abstraction as calling a spoon a spoon is an abstraction.
You can directly experience the spoon by touching it or seeing it and you don’t have any corresponding way to perceive the personal bubble. On the other hand, dsatan has that direct experience of the personal bubble.
I personally had times where I had a clear direct perception of it. With that direct experience it feels as concrete as the spoon.
It’s likely not impossible to develop that perception without Looking but Looking makes it a lot easier to develop that perception.
A few points. The metaphysical nihilism I was referring to is taking the logical step of realizing that that image of a man in an image of reality is just a model, that everything you think of is just in your head, so everything is just a model. “real” becomes meaningless—dereferenced from any particular thing.
Second, to be clearer about what actually requires Looking, you need Looking to some extent to understand what I’m doing in the analysis of reality (though I think I’m getting better at forcing people to Look so that they can understand it, but with regards to looking, that’s like someone holding up your bike and guiding you along instead of you balancing for yourself). Looking is necessary to come up with such an analysis in the first place. Looking is not necessary to understand the personal bubble, or to understand action fields. Looking is necessary to see them for the first time without someone pointing them out to you, and is very helpful in analyzing their structure.
(edit) Furthermore, a good chunck of people who read what I just wrote will be mislead as to what Looking is.
The fundamental issue is that we are communicating in language, the medium of ideas, so it is easy to get stuck in ideas. The only way to get someone to start looking, insofar as that is possible, is to point at things using words, and to get them to do things. This is why I tell you to do things like wave your arms about or attack someone with your personal bubble or try to initiate the action of touching a hot stove element.
(edit) Lastly, there is this so much to Look at. I am mostly Looking at Things, and The World. There is this whole realm of People which I have almost no experience Looking at and have only scratched the surface of with personal bubbles. Val is much more experienced at this, which is why he is able to do some of the things that he claims and I am not. It is also why I haven’t actually tried to point at that sort of stuff. But it is still there, waiting for us to Look at it.
This turns out to be mostly addressed in my response to your other comment, so I don’t have very much to say here. I’ll comment only that as far as I can tell, you’re knocking down strawmen and solving problems that don’t exist. That those problems would not require any ‘Looking’ to solve even if they did exist adds insult to injury.
Like, who has this “metaphysical nihilism” problem? Surely not anyone who has read and understood the Sequences (nor much of anyone else)… no doubt there are some people out there, who are confused in this particular way—but that’s true of almost any sort of confusion, no matter how silly. So if I don’t have the problem you cite, nor ever did have it, and can hardly even comprehend the confusion that would lead anyone to have it, what am I to think of your holding up your alleged solution to this non-problem as something which is unattainable without this particular unusual skill you vaunt?
In any case—to reiterate what I say in my other comment: thank you for taking the time to respond; I really do appreciate it.
What is the metaphyiscal nihilism problem… Do you know the person Shminux? (edit) He’s a lesswronger from way back. He avoids unsig “real”, and “true”, and things of that sort for this very reason. His catchphrase is “it’s just a model”.
And I’m quite confident that you’ve misinterpreted or don’t understand about 70% of what I’ve said, but your rejection is all “this is absurd” so it’s hard to get anything to grab onto there.
(Edit) the entirety of my response was a mistake. You’ve dratically missed the point of all that I’ve said, missed what I was doing and latched on to only the propositional content of those sentences that I wrote. Now you’ve taken this misunderstanding as licence to reject the whole thing.
This seems important. Please elaborate!
What were you doing? Wasn’t it “trying to answer my questions”, “saying things you consider to be true”, etc.? That’s what I usually assume people do, when they post comments in response to things I’ve asked. If you weren’t doing that, then (a) why on earth not, and (b) what were you doing?
a) I was saying things that I believed, but not all things you can do with words is to state true propositions. “Go wash the dishes” is not true. “Go to the kitchen and see what’s in the sink” is also not true. That is a type error. There is also a sense in which “the thing in the sink is what I call a knork” is not true if “knork” is not a word used by anyone but the person who is telling you that that think is a “knork”—if there is no larger social context for that to contradict. That last one is what I’m doing with action fields.
b) It was getting you to do things, and then pointing at the things that you subsequently experienced in doing those things. I’m trying to get you to have the realization that those things are things that are there. I’m also trying to get you to realize that those things are actually important.
So for example, the personal bubble is a thing, which is just there in the same sense as chairs are just there, which (almost) everyone has, and (almost) eveeryone has an implicit understanding of in the sense that they know how to navigate personal space and they can understand when people are too close. But they don’t stop and actually look at the thing which is the personal bubble itself and look at its experiential mechanics.
To give you an understanding of what I mean by just there, I have to point. It is not an idea so I can’t just tell you what it means, I have to get you to see it. Actually go and pick up an object somewhere around you (actually do this, don’t imagine what it’s like to do this). See how you have this immediate impression of how it being there, existing, in your hand. This immediate impression is what I mean by just there. Notice how it itself is not an idea that I can communicate to you in language. It’s something that I have to get you to experience and then point to that experience.
Back to the personal bubble, if you actually do the things that I said, which are designed to make the personal bubble come out and be tangible, you will notice that it is just there. It is just there in the same sense as whatever object you picked up was just there, but it is hard to see, like say how a certain sort of waterfowl might be hard to spot in tall brush unless you have lots of experience hunting it and spotting it.
(edit) If you were to immediately do something like say “that’s just a socially constructed phenomenon” or “that’s just something injected into my map by my brain”, you are turning your attention away from that thing and to an idea. Notice what those two “explanations” do in your mind. Where it leads your attention, and the way it gets you conceiving of things. Notice the movements in your mind between actually experiencing the thing and giving that explanation. Notice how I am again mostly getting you to do something, not making truth claims.
I understand, thank you. I believe I have gotten everything I could out of this thread. Your comments have been very valuable.
I really really don’t think you have. And I really think that this interaction has been a net negative for you. You have not demonstrated at any point that you have understood me. You have, in fact, failed to engage with me at all save to dismiss what I’ve written out of hand and call it absurd. Do you realize how stressful this interaction has been for me? How I am putting myself out there and you just attack in poor faith? I don’t really get the sense that you are even trying to understand me. This comment of yours makes me feel dismissed, as if you think I’m just some crazy person and you want to get away and ignore me but do so politely.
I do not feel that everything has been said, that there are things I need to clarify. So I will:
My critique of that train of thought originating from lesswrong comes in two parts. The first is interpretation, the second is turning inwards and looking at the gears of how that interpretation actually works and behaves in the mind. To look at what it actually does rather than just what it says.
The interpretive part is this (slightly edited):
That is the whole of the interpretive part. The rest is taking that whole interpretation as an object and look at what it actually does in the mind. Looking at the gears of the interpretation. If you think I’ve misinterpreted the sequences, then it is these two paragraphs here that you must talk about, not any of the rest, because the rest is not interpretation. The way to argue against the rest of that (given agreement about interpretation here) is to actually look at what it is doing in the mind and demonstrate that it is different from my account.
I would be happy to take this conversation to another venue (public or private, at your option; I have a blog whose comments section we can use, or perhaps IRC; email is also an option). For various reasons, LW is not ideal for continuing this discussion.
What was the result of your request for further communication outside of LessWrong?
It was more of an offer than a request, but there wasn’t any result.
If it helps, your explanations made perfect sense to me, like plain English. So thank you for putting yourself out there; you gave me and others something to chew on.
(I wrote a comment and it disappeared. Hopefully it doesn’t show up along with this one)
How is Val’s first response to Ben not satisfactory?
But here are a few things that it’s done for me:
Things like your personal bubble will not be invisible by default. Your personal bubble is real and just there despite it “not being made of atoms” and it “just being a thing your brain injects into your map”. Looking will give you handles and sensors relevant to all sorts of different parts of you, like those handles and sensors relevant to controlling your personal bubble, feeling your personal bubble, and seeing and feeling other people’s personal bubbles. Without it, you might be stuck in a theory that doesn’t account for your personal bubble and it remains hidden, or it calls your personal bubble unreal and makes it hard to look at. As another example, the energy flows of feng shui are a perceptual primitive related to good movement and flows of attention.
There is a philosophical line of thougth originating on lesswrong which comes up with a certain notion of what reality is. Looking will allow you to notice that the use of the word “real” in accordance to this notion of real is very different from the original use of the word real. Looking will allow you to see what is actually going on in this new meaning of real, and see how it has gone off the rails. Looking will allow you to find your way back to the original meaning and keep you grounded in coming to a reflective understanding of the nature of realness so that you don’t go off the rails again. And that’s why “nothing is probability 1, therefore real things are all ‘out there’ in the inaccessible territory and these ‘things’ are just my experiential maps in my brain which corresponds to things in the territory” is just a model, mistaken, and is both subordinate and at odds with the fact that you have always already been in the world, and this fact is necessarily a precondition to your doing philosophy.
You will see how “you are a brain” is wrong and “you are a product of your brain” is a model with extremely narrow and context specific use. You will notice the same about “everything is made of atoms.” These models are way overrated and overrepresented in this and similar communities, and are by no means fundamental to anything but the practice of certain scientific disciplines.
Quick meta note: neither comment of yours has disappeared, but once there are more than 100 comments in a post, they don’t all render at first (because rendering more than 100 comments at once is a bit bandw idth intensive). You have to click the “load more” at the top of the comments to see your new one.
I think you aren’t taking the cell phone world metaphor seriously enough. Moving down meta levels in this way will not help me explain anything to Alex about what looking up from his phone is like, except insofar as it involves doing “whispering into ear”-type stuff, which we’ve discussed elsewhere.
This seems like an odd reply. Suppose Alex were to ask what good comes of being able to do this “look up” thing, and you said “I can’t explain to you what looking up is”. Alex would see that as a non sequitur.
Similarly, suppose you launched into an explanation of your baking technique, and I asked you for a slice of cake. Does “serving you a slice of cake won’t help me explain the baking technique” make sense as a reply? It does not.
Where is the cake? Damn the explanations, man; show me the cake!
Making a photo of a cake and sending it to Alex doesn’t help him to learn about the cake that he would see if he would look up.
Alex might come up with a lot of arguments why he has much more beautiful pictures on his smart phone that look much tasty but that will be besides the point because cakes are for eating and not for looking at pictures of them.
Looking up from your phone provides experimentally verifiable “superpowers”—you can, for example, communicate with other Lookers Up via invisible gestures without texting them. Telepathy!
Maybe that’s a flaw in the analogy. But Valentine does claim real-world benefits, such as superhuman insight into psychology (as do other people who describe themselves as enlightened.) Maybe those aren’t “the point”, but demonstrating them convincingly would go a long way towards convincing the rest of us that there is a point and we just can’t see it.
The Buddha himself didn’t just say “trust me guys”, he supposedly did a bunch of miracles using his enlightenment-granted powers.
<b>To the contrary; it seems very easy to show me ‘enlightenment’. How? Well, just move down another level of meta: what is enlightenment good for? What does it let you do, in the real world? etc.—all the things I have been asking. Show us that thing! (Or, really, severalsuch things.)</b>
Somethings can be their own good, they don’t have to be “good for” something.
The author didn’t tell you enlightenment is a tool.
They said enlightenment is a kind of insight / experience.
Heck, even if it did have utility, for the person who experienced it (e.g. now I feel better about myself, my depression is gone, whatever), there doesn’t need to be any actual cake to show to others, much less one they can use without going through said experience themselves.
It’s like humor or experiencing a great musical piece.
If you don’t get it, there’s no cake to show you. Explanation of the joke’s mechanism or the music piece’s harmony or other aspects wouldn’t do much either.
But it’s still valuable to those who did get it.
Yes, he did. Several times, in fact, among which is a comment sibling to your own.
The OP explicitly claimed that there’s cake and that he has already shown it (without elaborating). See linked comment.
“FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST FACTOR THE FUCKING NUMBER!”
Look. I’ve explained the area where you would have to Look in order to see the cake. I’ve warned you that if I give you cake you won’t understand it and will even claim it is unreal or doesn’t count. I’ve then given you cake and you insist that it is unreal or doesn’t count, and then continue to demand cake, along with increasing hostility toward me for not trying.
If you imagine the world in which I’m actually just correct, you can understand where I might find this a bit annoying. And I imagine that you’re trying to push on the possibility that I’m not right, that I’m just deluded or something… but even if you’re right about that, please notice that from my vantage point you aren’t speaking whatsoever to what I’m saying. You’re still asking for which app to open in order to get an understanding of the amazing benefits of this “looking up” thing.
And I knew that this would be the kind of result if I tried to argue y’all into seeking enlightenment. So that’s not what I was aiming to do. Instead, I tried to say “Hey, notice this gaping hole in epistemology that this communication problem suggests exists?” But, once again, you zero in on “I won’t look at this epistemological problem until you prove to me that you have cake.” And I’m left kind of throwing my hands in the air because YOUR FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND THE EPISTEMOLOGY PROBLEM LEAVES YOU LITERALLY INCAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING WHY YOU CAN’T UNDERSTAND CAKE.
Yelling at me to give you cake CANNOT HELP with this. And no matter what I do, you are going to continue to insist that I’m mysteriously withholding cake.
People who have had kensho don’t have this communication problem with me. I gesture toward the thing and they go “Yep.” I give them examples of cake and they give me details they’ve noticed about it themselves. Sometimes I point out types of cake they’ve never thought of before, and then they goddamn Look, and then we can talk about it in ways that clearly make sense to both of us.
And they vividly relate to this problem of not being able to give people like you cake — because the whole goddamn point is that you have no clue what cake is!
So there’s obviously something real going on here, and pretty much all of us are standing over here saying “Yes this is really hugely goddamn important” (at least to each other — quite a few have given up trying to say anything about this to pre-kensho folk)… and I’m left staring at this impressive epistemic gap and going “Huh. Seems like even if the thing can’t be conveyed, at least the gap can? Surely people who care about truth will care about there being something that has this many people saying this strongly that it’s important and that their methods of truth-seeking are too low-dimensional to handle.”
…and then you demand cake.
*sigh*
Should we go through a laundry list of things you’ll dismiss for one reason or another? How you can cultivate a kind of resolve that is different but vastly more meaningful than anything you can yet understand? How you can actually see the way in which you have intrinsic and unshakable value, leaving you with a sense of perfect worth and a way of having room to actually goddamn care about people? How you can have roads to removing self-deception at a vastly deeper level than you were ever capable of even noticing before? How you can actually get what the generator of the original insights was that allowed the scientific revolution to happen in the first place? How you can learn to really actually pay attention to that small still voice of knowing that you always always always regret not paying attention to sooner?
No? None of that is allowed?
Then no, I can’t give you cake.
Because YOU WON’T LET ME.
Hold on, hold on. Clarify something for me, please. You say:
To make sure that I understand you properly, could you specify which thing that you’ve said is this ‘cake’ you’ve given me? (No need to re-explain it; simply quote yourself. I just want to be certain I know what to respond to.)
Separately from my other response…
What good is it?
What good is it? (Also, what does it mean to not have this?)
What particular self-deception have you removed? What new things have you discovered, thereby? Give some concrete examples, please.
What new insights have you generated, thereby? Give some concrete examples, please.
What good is it? What have you been able to know, thereby? Give some concrete examples, please.
All of that is allowed! I’d love to hear about concrete examples of what all of this stuff is good for! What has any of it helped you accomplish? What has it helped you learn, discover, create, invent, understand? Tell us! This sounds like exactly the sort of thing I’m after.