Bemused exasperation here. I’m grinning as I write this. I wondered if this post would produce this kind of effect… and I hoped not, but it’s not unexpected!
The thing that will most cause me to believe that kenshŌ is valuable for epistemology, will be some examples of things you have managed to do better as a result.
I’m not advocating trying for kenshō. You can’t try for it in any useful way. That’s not how it works. I honestly don’t care whether I persuade anyone of its value, because it does not matter whether you try for it. Or rather, if it does matter, it does so by making you obsessed in a way that can actually block the seeing. So, there isn’t really any good benefit to fighting with your analysis to try to persuade you of its value. That’s all on you!
And I imagine that’s frustrating. And I do apologize; I’m really not trying to be frustrating or vague here. It’s just… well, see the entire opening post!
But to steelman your… hmm, mix of a request and a challenge: I receive you as wanting either for me to give you concrete things learning how to Look has done for me, or to admit I can’t and retract the value of what I’m saying.
That’s a fine want. I really would prefer you just ask though. There’s something a little weird about responding to “Hey, I think there’s something interesting over in those bushes” with “If you want to convince me, here are my requirements.” It adds weird status noise to the conversation. And I like you, and I think you like me, and I’d prefer we remember that even if we’re talking online through text this time!
That aside: I’ll share some concrete things, but I think it’ll come across weird. It’s a bit like if you get mathematical proof, but no one else around you understands it, and are now insisting that you demonstrate how this has helped you do things better in terms they can understand, on pain of rejecting the relevance of what you’re saying. You might be able to muster up some clever thing, at which point you can be deemed a goddamn sorcerer, but you damn well know at the end of that that they still won’t understand proof. You’ll just be magical, or making claims that you’re highly confident of that they don’t know whether to believe.
So, dear sir, I give unto thee crazy shit:
I can cut through confusion enormously more easily now. A huge amount of what Eliezer talks about in the Sequences is actually a lot easier to understand as applications of Looking. Not all of it, and maybe not even most of it: quite a bit of it is training and using a certain kind of mathematical thinking. But the stuff about actually changing your mind is… well, it can’t work reliably by mental/emotional force the way I hear so very many rationalists talking, and it’s now super obvious to me why. It’s really easy if you know how to Look. As in, I think it’s the natural thing you want to do if you can Look at your own mind.
Related: I seem to have developed Looking well enough to track my own subconscious strategies. Turns out, nearly everyone runs sexual or social schemes below conscious awareness for strategic reasons. (This is where “load-bearing bugs” come from, and why meaningful change is so hard.) I’m no exception — and some of my strategies were hurting people I cared about, and I was motivated not to notice. And once I did notice, those same strategies wanted to rearrange to do some kind of remorseful thing that was still in line with the same strategies but had many surface features of a deep emotional realization. Actually Looking made this whole gibberish easy to track and work around. This let me meaningfully mend a relationship with an ex I saw I had badly mistreated such that we’re now very good friends. (I’m still reaching out to others I’ve hurt and working on mending things… but it’s tricky to convey that and how I’ve changed, so this is currently slow-going.)
I’m in the process of restructuring some of the CFAR material to account for what I can now readily see about how minds work. I haven’t been able to convey the core insight, but it does seem to make a pretty deeply profound impact on a lot of people. On the surface it looks something like “No, really, you’re a game theoretic agent” and then following the implications. But the reason for this was because I knew this would impact a particular slice of the CFAR participant population more deeply in a particular way, and I was right. (Doing follow-ups with dear folk from Prague to verify. In many cases it worked slightly better than expected.)
I now have a deep, deep, deep reservoir of energy I can call on whenever I need. I don’t usually do this because I can also tell what the consequences are of using that reservoir. But if I need it, I have no doubt I can just go for 36+ hours at high function. I’ve tested that a few times and it works damn well — but it’s still unkind to my body, so I don’t care to do it.
It’s waaaaaaaay easier for me to hold emotional space for others. Way way way easier. I’m basically not suffering, I see their suffering so very much more clearly, and most of my self-consciousness about being in connection with others is… hmm, I want to say “gone” but maybe “irrelevant” is a better description. I slip in this sometimes, when I forget how to Look and fall into old habits… but that’s happening vanishingly more rarely as time goes on.
I can form deep, deep pacts with others who know how to Look. This is harder to explain, but I can point to an analogy clearly, I think: if you’re in the cell phone world and you see someone else who has figured out how to look up, there’s a kind of deep collaboration you two can do, and a level of communication you can have, that others literally cannot understand pre-kenshō. In the real-world analog, this creates room for a kind of bond that lets us sidestep most primate political baloney, because there’s common knowledge that we can both Look at all that stuff, and that that’s not what’s important.
That’s not exhaustive. Let me know if that hits the type you’re looking for?
I will mention that I have some notion of a thing you might be pointing towards: I’ve experienced ontological updates—updates to the feelings that make up the building blocks of how I think. And this does require a certain ‘get out of your head / no seriously look up’ motion, which you might be pointing too.
Yes. That. That’s much more the thing I want to point at. I don’t care if you or anyone else meditates; that’s just an old, sometimes useful tool for learning to Look.
But sometimes when someone has a hard time explaining something, it’s because they’re just confused. So many people are trying to communicate supposed fundamental truths, and aren’t showing much for it. As I say, my background skepticism is high.
Your epistemic state makes sense to me. And also… well, to quote my original article:
“And yes, there’s most definitely an “it”. This isn’t just brains getting flooded with feeling-of-profundity without an object. And it totally makes sense that some people think that. Just… from this vantage point, those objections come across a bit like people arguing that science is just another religion. Or more to the point, it’s like trying to convince me that I have no subjective experience: no matter how cunning and logical and well-researched the argument, I’m still here listening to you.”
I don’t have any particularly good ideas for what an alternative goal of this post could be, and would be interested in more elaboration on that. It definitely seems to me that the goal of the post is to teach something, and as is usually required for teaching, to motivate why the thing you are teaching is important. If this post is only for people who are already motivated to learn about the things you describe, then that’s fine, but I did not get that sense from the way it was written.
I was attempting to illustrate an epistemic puzzle, and that there is a known solution, but it is hard to tell people what it is, which is itself part of the puzzle.
It seems many folk are getting caught up in the puzzle instead of zooming out to the meta-level. Which is probably my fault: I still suspect there’s a way I could aim my explanation at the meta-level that would bypass this confusion.
But instead, we’re myred in the confusion. Which is okay; I’m learning, and this whole set of comment threads is doing a beautiful job of illustrating the phenomena I was talking about! If nothing else I’ll be able to use all this to clarify something useful later.
Upon reflection, I think maybe I can spell out the logic of what I was trying to focus on a little more clearly.
There’s this thing, ``flibble’’, that is super hard to understand. Some people come to understand it and can then talk to each other about it. But they can’t explain flibble to pre-understanding folk. There’s some kind of process that’s basically unrelated to the attempts to explain flibble that lets people suddenly get flibble.
It really doesn’t matter what flibble is. The curious thing from an epistemic point of view (to me) is that there seems to be a skill to getting flibble. It looks like it’s a very general “get my ontology to update when I have no damn clue beforehand what the update is” skill. That seems damn useful.
The problem is, that skill is just as subject to non-understandability as flibble is. Which means you need the skill to some extent in order to bootstrap.
I do not care what flibble is. I’m not trying to convince anyone of the value of flibble. I’m trying to point at this puzzle and note that it suggests a really huge goddamn hole in epistemology as we normally talk about it.
It just so happens that flibble, when properly understood, is exactly the same thing as the result of using this skill. That has resulted in some confusion, because a lot of people here think they know something about flibble and are in fact wrong. I tried to spell that out, but that seemed to come across as an argument that flibble as they understood it beforehand is good.
So:
I don’t care about convincing anyone about anything about “enlightenment”.
I think there’s something damn important about Looking.
And even if I can’t convey that “something damn important”, I think there’s something understandable and interesting about the epistemic puzzle.
I want to address this response, because it fits a pattern I’ve seen a few times, which I think is an important aspect of this discussion. Here’s the pattern:
Example 1
“I’ve invented a fascinating new baking technique! With it, I have baked an amazing new cake!”
“An amazing new cake?! Sounds delicious! Could we have a taste?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about the cake, I want to talk about the baking technique.”
Example 2
“I’ve invented an amazing new programming technique! With it, I have developed an awesome new app!”
“An awesome new app?! Sounds cool! Where can we download it?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about the app, I want to talk about the programming technique.”
Example 3
“I’ve come up with a whole new way to write fiction! With it, I have written an incredible novel!”
“An incredible novel?! Sounds wonderful! Could we read it?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about the novel, I want to talk about the new writing method.”
But the only reason we might possibly care about your new baking technique is if it lets us bake amazing cakes. The only reason we might possibly want to hear about your amazing new programming technique is if let us make cool apps. And the only reason we might have to be interested in your thoughts on writing is if we believed that your ideas would let us write incredible fiction.
The only thing that makes us want to hear what you have to say about the meta-level thing, is if we believe your claims about how the meta-level thing leads to the object-level things. (Otherwise, what on earth is the point?)
And the most obvious way to show us that, indeed, the meta-level thing leads to the object-level thing, would be to show us the object-level thing first—which you in fact claim to have, but (frustratingly! inexplicably!) refuse to produce.
After all, it would be different if you had said “I have invented an amazing new baking technique… no, I haven’t used it to bake any delicious cakes, why do you ask?” But you’re not saying that! You tell us that you have a cake! It’s an excellent cake, and is exactly the sort of cake that we could bake, if we used your cool new baking technique…
Of course we want to see the cake. Why wouldn’t you want to show it to us? Not only would we be impressed, but we would certainly want to hear all abouthow you baked such a culinary wonder. Could you imagine a more receptive audience for your tale of baking techniques?
But you’re holding out on us.
That is why people resist attempts to jump right to the meta level.
I do think there are things in this general topic area that are worth understanding, but the original post and most of the comments have been pretty useless to anyone trying to understand who doesn’t already. Some could even be seen as taunting people over their lack of understanding, which be perfectly frank, I find obnoxious. So I’ll try to give a quick overview of how I understand this while hopefully avoiding those pitfalls.
Take something like learning to wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow at a time, or whistle. These can’t be explained in words, but words and other stimuli can make it more likely that you’ll stumble onto the correct action. Innate aptitude is probably a factor, too.
If you think of your current level of happiness or euphoria (to pick a simple example) as the output of a function with various inputs, some of these inputs can be changed through voluntarily mental actions that similarly can’t be directly explained in words and aren’t obvious. Things like meditating long enough with correct technique can cause people to stumble across the way to do this. Some of the inputs can be changed about as easily as wiggling your ears, while others can be much more difficult or apparently impossible, maybe analogous to re-learning motor functions after a stroke.
My guess as to what’s being referred to as “Looking” amounts to having enough experience with this sort of activity that the mental state you happen to be in right now—even though it still colors everything you think and experience to more-or-less the same extent as ever—having directly confirmed that it can be voluntarily changed given the appropriate effort, stops seeming as particularly special, or magical, or all-encompassing as it used to, and that’s the source of the “looking up from the screen” and “getting out of the car” metaphors.
(I mean “mental state” in an expansive way, including everything from your current mood to your beliefs about the nature of the universe to whether or not you’re currently hallucinating.)
As for impressive feats, or the “cake,” I’m pretty sure they aren’t really all that impressive. There’s low-hanging fruit that can be personally fulfilling but not particularly outwardly impressive, and the high-hanging fruit mostly amounts to an odd form of wireheading that leaves you outwardly functional but without a sense of self or of caring about anything.
This is one of the most useful comments in this thread; there’s not much to say in response to most of it, except “that makes a lot of sense, thank you”. So instead, here’s some commentary to a part of this that I object to:
Take something like learning to wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow at a time, or whistle. These can’t be explained in words, but words and other stimuli can make it more likely that you’ll stumble onto the correct action.
You may not be able to explain how to do these things in words. But you can certainly explain in words what these things are (for one of them, you just did)! And certainly, if you wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow, or whistle, that you are doing something unusual (and what you are doing) will be blindingly obvious, without you even needing to point it out.
And so it would be a perfectly unsurprising scenario, if you and I were having an ordinary conversation, and suddenly you whistled (suppose I have never heard anyone whistle before):
clone of saturn:whistles
Said: Whoa! What… what did you just do?? You just made, like, a weird sound!
clone of saturn: yeah, it’s called ‘whistling’
Said: Gosh! Can you do it again?
clone of saturn:whistles again
Said: … fascinating! How did you do that? Could I do that??
clone of saturn: well… it might be hard to explain…
Said: Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I have no idea how I’d go about doing that…! That sure is a really cool thing you can do, though…
Obviously, this is nothing even remotely like the ‘Looking’ scenario, where not only are we merely told that its practitioners can do cool and unusual things (instead of being shown those things, even when we ask them to show us), but the alleged things they can do are so vague and poorly-explained that it’s unclear how we would even notice that they were doing those things, even if we were in their physical presence.
Edit: Of course you’ve already explained the reason for this disanalogy—why no impressive feats may be produced by those who are able to ‘Look’. I’m merely calling attention to it—that it’s not merely a “can’t explain in words, because hard-to-verbalize procedural knowledge” situation, of the ‘whistling’ or ‘ear-wiggling’ sort.
I 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.
---
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.
FWIW, this aptly describes my own adverse reaction to the OP. “I have this great insight, but I not only can’t explain it to you, but I’m going to spend the balance of my time explaining why you couldn’t understand it if I tried to explain it” sounds awfully close to bulveristic stories like, “If only you weren’t blinded by sin, you too would see the glory of the coming of the lord”.
That the object level benefits offered seem to be idiographic self-exhaltations augur still poorer (i.e. I cut through confusion so much more easily now (no examples provided); I have much greater reserves to do stuff; I can form much deeper pacts with others who, like I, can See the Truth.) I recall the ‘case’ for Ander’s Connection Theory was of a similar type. But at least connection theory at least sketched something like a theory to consider on its merits.
There needs to be either some object-level description (i.e. “This is what Looking is”), or—if that really isn’t possible—demonstration of good results (i.e. “Here’s a great post on a CFAR-adjecent topic, and this was thanks to Looking.”) Otherwise, the recondite and the obscurantist look very much alike.
I theorize that you’re experiencing at least two different common, related, yet almost opposed mental re-organizations.
One, which I approve of, accounts for many of the effects you describe under “Bemused exasperation here...”. It sounds similar to what I’ve gotten from writing fiction.
Writing fiction is, mostly, thinking, with focus, persistence, and patience, about other people, often looking into yourself to try to find some point of connection that will enable you to understand them. This isn’t quantifiable, at least not to me; but I would still call it analytic. I don’t think there’s anything mysterious about it, nor anything especially difficult other than (A) caring about other individuals—not other people, in the abstract, but about particular, non-abstract individuals—and (B) acquiring the motivation and energy to think long and hard about them. Writing fiction is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I don’t find it as mentally draining per minute as chess, though perhaps that’s because I’m not very interested in chess. But one does it for weeks on end, not just hours.
(What I’ve just described applies only to the naturalist school of fiction, which says that fiction studies about particular, realistic individuals in particular situations in order to query our own worldview. The opposed, idealistic school of fiction says that fiction presents archetypes as instructional examples in order to promulgate your own worldview.)
The other thing, your “flibble”, sounds to me like the common effect, seen in nearly all religions and philosophies, of a drastic simplification of epistemology, when one blinds oneself to certain kinds of thoughts and collapses one’s ontology into a simpler world model, in order to produce a closed, self-consistent, over-simplified view of the world. Platonists, Christians, Hegelians, Marxists, Nazis, post-modernists, and SJWs each have a drastically-simplified view of what is in the world and how it operates, which always includes “facts” and techniques which discount all evidence to the contrary.
For example, the Buddhist / Hindu / Socratic / post-modernist technique of deconstruction relies on an over-simplified concept of what concepts and categories are—that they must have a clearly delineated boundary, or else must not exist at all. This goes along with an over-simplified logocentric conception of Truth, which claims that any claim stated in human language must be either True (necessarily, provably, 100% of the time) or False (necessarily, etc.), disregarding both context and the slipperiness of words. From there, they either choose dualism (this system really works and we must find out what is True: Plato, Christians, Hegel, Marx) or monism (our ontology is obviously broken and there is no true or false, no right or wrong, no you or me: Buddhism, Hinduism, Parmenides, Nazis, Foucault, Derrida, and other post-modernists). Nearly all of Western and Eastern philosophy is built on this misunderstanding of reality.
For another example, phenomenologists (including Heidegger), Nazis, and SJWs use the concept of “lived experience” to deny that quantified empirical observations have any epistemological value. This is how they undermine the authority of science, and elevate violence and censorship over reasoned debate as a way of resolving disagreements.
A third example is the claim, made by Parmenides, Plato, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and too many others to name, that the senses are misleading. This argument begins with the observation that every now and then, maybe one time in a million—say, when seeing a mirage in the desert, or a stick underwater (the most-frequent examples)--the senses mislead you. Then it concludes the senses are always wrong, and assumes that reason is always 100% reliable despite the obvious fact that no 2 philosophers have ever agreed with each other using abstract reason as a guide. It’s a monumentally stupid claim, but once one has accepted it, one can’t get rid of it, because all of the evidence that one should do so is now ruled out.
Derrida’s statement “there is no outside text” is another argument that observational evidence should be ignored, and that rather than objective quantified evidence, epistemology should be based on dialectic. In practice this means that a claim is considered proven once enough people talk about it. This is the epistemology of German idealism and post-modernism. This is why post-modernists continually talk about claims having been “proven” when a literature search can’t turn up a single argument supporting their claims; they are simply accepted as “the text” because they’ve been repeated enough. (Barthes’ “Death of the Author” is the clearest example: its origin is universally acknowledged to be Barthes’ paper of that title; yet that paper makes no arguments in favor of its thesis, but rather asserts that everyone already knows it.) Needless to say, once someone has accepted this belief, their belief system is invulnerable to any good argument, which would necessarily involve facts and observations.
The “looking up” is usually a looking away from the world and ignoring those complicating factors which make simple solutions unworkable. Your “flibble” is probably not the addition of some new understanding, but the cutting away and denial of some of the complexities of life to create a self-consistent view of the world.
Genuine enlightenment, the kind provided by the Enlightenment, or by understanding calculus, or nominalism, isn’t non-understandable. It doesn’t require any sudden leap, because it can be explained piece by piece.
There are some insights which must be experienced, such as that of learning to whistle, or ride a bicycle, or feeling your voice resonate in your sinuses for the first time when trying to learn to sing. These are all slightly mysterious; even after learning, you can’t communicate them verbally. But none of them have the grand, sweeping scale of changes in epistemology, which is the sort of thing you’re talking about, and which, I think, must necessarily always be explainable, on the grounds that the epistemology we’ve already got isn’t completely useless.
Your perception of needing to make a quantum leap in epistemology sounds like Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith”, and is symptomatic not of a gain of knowledge, but a rejection of knowledge. This rejection seems like foolishness beforehand (because it is), but like wisdom after making it (because now everything “makes sense”).
Escaping from such a trap, after having fallen into it, is even harder than making the leap of faith that constructed the trap. I was raised in an evangelical family, who went to an evangelical church, had evangelical friends, read evangelical books, and went on evangelical vacations. I’ve known thousands of evangelicals throughout my life, and not one of them other than I rejected their faith.
Genuine enlightenment doesn’t feel like suddenly understanding everything. It feels like suddenly realizing how much you don’t understand.
Here’s some words that are wrong but I think close:
I want to get you to experience enlightenment. Not because enlightenment is valuable, but because it’s hard, and the skill of achieving enlightenment generalises to learning a bunch of other things (that are similarly hard).
Is that sort of what you meant? If not, I’ll tap out for now until your next post.
The main point of contention I have is that I’m not trying to get people to experience enlightenment. I’m trying to have people notice that the fact that (a) enlightenment is a real thing and (b) they can’t understand it via explanations, indicates something really damn important about limits in the kind of epistemology we normally talk about here.
And, it looks like Looking is a way of patching those limitations. So it seems worth considering.
Right. I’ll repeat (in advance of your follow-up post) that while it’s interesting to note that I can’t understanding enlightenment via explanation (and that englightenment is a real thing), this is still not enough to suggest that it’s worth exploring—even if it helps me understand other things like enlightenment.
For example, there are many deep skills where the experience of the skill is not amenable to communication via text, yet the skill and experience are definitely real. As someone who has studied classical music for a decade, I’m not able to convey the experience of playing a Bach prelude to you via text. I can imagine similar things for great sports players, or other experts.
This alone doesn’t (I think) suggest anything too important about epistemology. I await your next post with evidence about why Looking does have something important to say about epistemology!
The analogy breaks down because you don’t need to be able to play a Bach prelude in order to listen to someone else playing it. What would it be like, for you, if that were the world we were in? Can you imagine what it would be like to try to convey to pre-music folk even that music is real and that it might be worth learning how to listen to it? And if that were something you could readily see about how people cannot see something that is so obviously real to you… wouldn’t that cause a more general worry about the epistemic state of the species? For that matter, how would you come to notice things like music that YOU can’t yet understand this way?
The next post isn’t about evidence about why Looking has something important to say about epistemology. It’s a model of how I have done several things like reach kensho, and the model has been refined as a result of what I’ve come to see as a result of Looking. So, I don’t think you’re going to find it scratches that itch. I expect the parts that I can convey that came from Looking won’t themselves seem like they require Looking, so the fact that I had to transcend my own epistemic state to get there won’t be visible. Alas.
Can you imagine what it would be like to try to convey to pre-music folk even that music is real and that it might be worth learning how to listen to it?
This analogy is capturing my current understanding of this post and its various comments pretty well: Looking is like music, in that it is a difficult, voluntaryish act of observing and manipulating hidden mental states. This will result in wireheading, among other things, but it might be sometimes useful. (Note that music is also wireheading, but it can still be useful in narrow contexts.)
FWIW, I’ve come to think that wireheading is an anti-concept as applied to humans. It’s one of those “presume the conclusion” type mental movements. In practice it seems to act like a back door for arguments based on belief residue like the Protestant work ethic / “pleasure is sinful” stuff.
(A little more concretely: It makes sense to talk about some system engaging in wireheading only when there’s a goal imposed from outside the system. It’s like glorified Goodharting. But if the goals come from within the system, it stops being clear what “wireheading” means. On the inside it might feel like “Oh, I just found a vastly easier way to get what I want — and what I want wasn’t what I thought I wanted!” Without an external evaluation criterion, that actually just becomes correct.)
With that said, I think I intuit what you mean by calling music and Looking “wireheading”. I don’t mean to dismiss that. Stuff like, if you meditate enough to get Great Insights™ such that you don’t bother to eat food anymore and you die, that seems like a pretty dramatic failure and kind of throws those “insights” into question.
An interesting fact came to my mind; music that affects one’s mental state is forbidden in Islam.
Perhaps the reason this theme of “sinful pleasure” keeps repeating is the observation that pleasure is a reward signal that does not quite match the utility functions of the conscious mind. At least, that has always been the key motivator of this idea subspace to me.
I’m confused. From your description, I thought that Looking was the same thing as Enlightenment, but now you’re saying you only care about convincing us about Looking, not “enlightenment”?
Best mapped in the very dense book, “pointing out the great way”.
One path to enlightenment is to provide a moment of pure clear seeing (a state of mind) and align the rest of the mind with the path back there. Then let the result play out.
(Context—Digging up a 5 year old post...) The idea of pure clear seeing, is a momentary state of experience which … wait I said this above.
Maybe it’s a bit like finally “getting” a math equation. It seemed confusing for a while, then it seemed to not make sense, and then clear seeing … at least in the mental understanding sense. In my experience, the subjective sense of “pure clear seeing” extends from literal visual stimuli appearing sharper and vivid, through emotional clarity, to mental constructs being sharp and vivid in the mind’s eye as well.
I appreciate you writing the list of examples, but also don’t find them currently particularly compelling, mostly because they are hard to verify from my current perspective (which is fine and the real value might just be hard to communicate).
If I say that a benefit is a feeling of enormous peace and relief, you’ll have a hard time verifying that too. Seems to me like you’re Goodharting on what you’re allowing to be compelling.
I’m really quite disheartened that you find the value of e.g. mending a long-hurt relationship to be “hard to communicate”. That’s… I hurt for you.
I have very high priors on people making up post-hoc stories about the things that happened to them, and the reasons for why they happened. While I don’t disbelieve that a long-hurt relationship of yours has gotten better, I am very skeptical of any specific story you tell of how it has come to that, and so don’t really take that account to be super strong evidence.
You can frame it as a “lemons problem”, or you can frame it as an inevitable result of information assymetries, but in either case this makes benefits like the ones you describe hard to communicate.
This would make sense to me applied to a generic person about whom you know very little; in context it feels to me like you’re outside viewing too hard here. It may be socially much less comfortable to give an inside view description of why you don’t find Val’s comments persuasive, so you don’t need to interpret this as a request for such a description, but this strikes me as reasoning that’s been optimized for defensibility instead of truth-seeking and that seems worth pointing out.
What I know about Val does not make me update downwards particularly strongly about the tendency to make up post-hoc stories. Very few people strike me as being particularly more trustworthy in that direction, which in itself might be a failure of outside-viewing too hard, but that’s definitely my considered epistemic state, taking into account what I know about Val.
(May it be said that my general distrust of people having developed real rationality skills has been a source of disagreement with many, and some source of personal tension between me and others, including me and Val in the past.)
[Meta note to onlookers who seem to have maybe downvoted Qiaochu’s comment]
I think a comment like the one Qiaochu wrote would indeed be out of place and weird for people who didn’t have a personal relationship with me, but given the kind of relationship me and Qiaochu do have, I found the comment to be well-placed and helpful, and expect that the general algorithm of highlighting these potential faults in my thinking patterns will be very useful for me in the long-run, if executed by Qiaochu.
Ah. I didn’t realize you were referring to information asymmetry. That makes sense to me.
I still think you’re doing the updating math wrong. Qiaochu’s thing about you outside-view-ing too hard rings true from where I stand. But I think this is an epistemic disagreement you and I have had for way longer than four months. So… I guess my examples don’t get to be compelling to you. Oh well.
It’s a bit like if you get mathematical proof, but no one else around you understands it, and are now insisting that you demonstrate how this has helped you do things better in terms they can understand, on pain of rejecting the relevance of what you’re saying.
This seems like a reasonable request, and if the value of mathematical/algebraic reasoning had not been presented to me, I would have not invested as many hours as I have into learning math.
I think, though I haven’t tried too much, it’s at least in principle not that difficult to explain the value of mathematical proof to new people: Either give them a bunch of false proofs and let them deal with the confusion, or give them any of the dozens of exercises in Thinking Physics (which are themselves pretty well-motivated) and highlight how an understanding of mathematical proof would help them solve the problems. I am interested in being given a concrete problem, of the nature that Thinking Physics provides, that I could solve more easily with the tools/perspective you describe.
I’m a bit frustrated with you, Oli. I don’t think you’re engaging with the hypothetical in good faith.
A huge portion of my math teaching experience was with preservice elementary and middle school teachers. These were people who would come to my math class as part of a program to get a credential, because they like kids and want to teach kids. And most of them are at best bored of math.
They really didn’t get proof. Proofs were a kind of social ritual. Conveying to them what the value of proving is was not on the table; they did proofs in order to navigate being graded. The only way I was able to get them to engage meaningfully with math was to point out to them that their knowledge of math and good math teaching would impact their students.
I’m guessing most of your math teaching experience is with UC Berkeley student caliber, yes? Of course you can convey proof to someone like that. Or someone like you.
If you imagine you’re in a world where the people around you are more gruff mechanic types, or caring “people-oriented” types, etc., who don’t understand what analytical thinking is… then you’ll find yourself in the position I’m talking about. Giving them Thinking Physics type problems won’t work because they won’t engage with them. After all, you haven’t convinced them of the value of proof-based thinking! You have to show them something that they consider practical.
Please work with me here, Oli. I know you’re smart enough not to have needed me to spell out all of the above. Please turn off the “I must show my rational analysis skills by coming up with a sharp counterargument to literally everything” stuff and actually try to see my point?
I am interested in being given a concrete problem, of the nature that Thinking Physics provides, that I could solve more easily with the tools/perspective you describe.
I like that question. It’s a tricky one, because knowledge of physics isn’t enough to generate Thinking Physics type puzzles. Likewise, I don’t know if I can give you a good puzzle for Looking off the top of my head. I’ll think on that and see if I can come up with something.
Though I warn, even if I do come up with something, I expect you’ll not find it satisfying. E.g., koans are a classic example of puzzles that are vastly easier to solve by Looking than by normal thinking, but Less Wrong style rationality now has a special toolset for hacking some koans apart that zen masters would consider totally and completely missing the point but give rationalists a kind of pride as though their toolset is doing something even better than answering the koans through Looking. (“Ah, but maybe it is better! After all, statistics and logic and blah blah blah!” :-P )
Yes, I don’t think it is possible to convey the value that “understanding proof” provides to everyone. But even for someone who cannot easily understand, asking to be shown the value is a very reasonable response, and if they cannot be shown the value, it makes sense for them to not spend their time learning mathematical proof. Trying to teach them proof, without them seeing any value in it, seems doomed to failure.
I can imagine being in a world where it is similarly hard for me to understand the value of kensho. But in that world the necessary first step for me learning, is to be motivated to learn. As I said, it seems fine if the target audience for this post is not me. And it seems plausible, though obviously sad to me, that my mind is shaped so that I can not understand the value without spending dozens of hours on good faith on following your argument along. And if you continue writing this post-series, I will try to seriously engage with the things you are describing, even without seeing the value directly, because I do think you have some interesting perspectives and this whole area might have some value in it.
What I am trying to say is that for the goal of making me understand kensho, the most effective next step for you, would be to try to show me the value. And you might expect that not to work, or that might simply not be your goal, and that’s completely fine. And in that case I will try to understand the things you are pointing at anyways, but I won’t spend more than half an hour per post that you write. And if that won’t be enough, then I will leave with a mostly unchanged epistemic state, which would make me obviously a bit sad.
I think that a) Val has obtained a real and valuable skill, b) Oli is engaging in good faith and making a reasonable request, and c) that there is a type of post that Val could conceivably write which Oli would find satisfactory.
I hope to eventually prove this by achieving enough skill in this area myself (making the assumption I’m correct in understand what Val’s skill is), obtaining the value, and then conveying this in a convincing manner such that anyone reasoning as Oli does is motivated by my case.
I’m honestly flummoxed about how to create the type of post you’re suggesting. Given the clarity of everything else you’ve written here about this, I’m inclined to believe you. And I’d much like to write that post, or see it written. Any pointers?
Thanks! Okay, some pointers :) You asked for them!
Your writing style is characteristcally evocative—the kind of writing I’d use to point at the majesty of stars, the tragedy of death, and the grandeur of all that could be. It’s emotional, and that is perhaps both its strength and its weakness.
You have the right style to conjure strong feelings around things one already believes and endorses (perfect for Solstice), but perhaps less so to convince people of things they’re skeptical of. A pastor’s rousing sermon about Jesus’s love for all mankind, while moving to his congregation, does little to convince me about the matter.
Attitude
Unfortunately, it seems that people who don’t know how to intentionally Look literally cannot conceptually understand what Looking is for . . .
I emphatically reject this. You’ve observed that you don’t feel understood when you explain your experience and inferred that this is a deficiency on the part of the listener rather than the explainer. I think that’s the wrong inference, even if many explainers have struggled similarly. Explaining is hard. But even supposing you are completely right, most listeners are not going to respond charitably to claims of “you couldn’t possibly understand”. (I’ll be directly harsh and say I think accusing someone of not engaging in good faith rather than doubting your own communication is suggestive of the wrong attitude.)
Rightly or wrongly, beneath the post there is an undertone with a few sentiments: “Oh my god, guys!!”, “This is something really, really important and you couldn’t possibly understand, I’m frustrated”, and “You don’t get it! Only special people get it.” (And perhaps a hint of enjoying the fact you have a special secret that others don’t. We’re all human, after all.)
The tone I think would be persuasive is along the lines of “I think I’m onto something big, I think it’s had big benefits, I’d like you too benefit too, this is difficult to convey, but please hear out my best case.”
Content
At the end of the day, I think this is about providing a clear and solid case for why you believe what you believe. Sketching out it lightly, the case I might make could look like:
Observations: I spent time meditating; I have experienced benefits X and Y.
Model: Meditation and minfulness consist of moving parts A1, A2, A3, which predict results X and Y. (Here are my models of neuroscience, attention, etc.)
Claim: Meditation and mindfulness practice has given me be benefits X and Y.
Listeners might then doubt any of the pieces. They might be incredulous that I experienced such exteme benefits (your claims are pretty extreme), they might doubt that even if I experienced these benefits, that they were attritutable to what I’m claiming is the cause (rather than say, placebo or mania), or they might find my model implausible (brains don’t work that way!). But at least if I have a 3rd person, mechanistic model, we can argue about its correctness.
Maybe I should add that we can analogize Kensho/enlightenment to consciousness. If we imagine some unconscious AIs modelling the possible existence, possible purpose, and expected observations you would get if humans have this “consciousness” thing, I think they could reasonably do that even if there was no way for them to experience consciousness from the inside with their own minds. They could talk about how it worked and what its benefits were without “seeing” it from the inside. I think they could use that understanding to decide if they want to self-modify to have consciousness, and that a convincing case could be made “from the outside”.
Summing up a rambly response, I think a good post on enlightenment has at least one of the following:
1) Your observations, inferences, and why the reader should trust them.
2) A 3rd party perspective, mechanistic model for how enlightenment works and the resultant predictions.
To close, the post I’d write would large be this is what I’ve experienced, this is the evidence, and this is my model for WHY.
One more pointer—clarity on the purpose of a post is paramount. From your comments, it seems like a few different purposes got mixed in:
a) Kensho/Looking are very powerful, I want to motivate you to try them.
b) There is a puzzle around communicating things which you can only conceptually understand once you’ve experienced them. (I’d focus mostly on the puzzle and make it clear Kensho is but an example in this post.)
There’s a dictum: “1) Tell them what you’re going to tell them, 2) Tell them, 3) Tell them what you’ve told them.” Going by your CFAR classes too, I feel like you don’t like telling people what you’re going to tell them (you even want them to be confused). I think this unsurprisingly results in confusion.
I do feel some exasperation. You’re right in picking up on that.
My experience is that even when I’m not exasperated, this doesn’t convey to people who haven’t done any Looking. I don’t mean that as a judgment against anyone; it’s just a really strong phenomenon, and I think it’s getting conflated with my frustration.
But I’ll take your push-back seriously and reflect on this.
They might be incredulous that I experienced such exteme benefits
Even if the believe that Valentine has actually got those extreme benefits that’s going to make them believe that Valentine is doing something special and not something very basic.
In New Age circles you have plenty of people who believes in the magical powers of enlightment and who spent years searching for it with nothing to show for it. The openness about making extreme claims is one of the key differences that distinguishes New Age thinking from other spiritual traditions and the empiric results of it are poor.
I’m honestly flummoxed about how to create the type of post you’re suggesting. Given the clarity of everything else you’ve written here about this, I’m inclined to believe you. And I’d much like to write that post, or see it written. Any pointers?
But even for someone who cannot easily understand, asking to be shown the value is a very reasonable response, and if they cannot be shown the value, it makes sense for them to not spend their time learning mathematical proof.
I didn’t say, or think, that Ben’s response was unreasonable. I was trying to illustrate via analogy why giving him what he was asking for was going to be extremely hard.
I also wasn’t trying to convince Ben, or anyone else, to seek kensho or do meditation or anything of the sort. I had hoped that the self-reference of the problem would encourage some people to want to learn to Look, which is why I gave some guidelines at the end for going in that direction if one wants. Unfortunately, it seems that people who don’t know how to intentionally Look literally cannot conceptually understand what Looking is for, so if y’all need that before you’ll try (which is understandable but still kind of frustrating from over here), then I guess you ain’t tryin’!
…at least, not consciously as a result of this post.
I think what I was trying to say doesn’t require Looking to understand. The analogy of conveying the value of proof should make sense even if what it’s analogous to doesn’t.
My frustration with Oli there was about him arguing with the analogy rather than using the analogy to try to understand what I was saying. This is a communication problem I’ve had with him in person too, so I was hoping to cut through the whole process by pointing at the meta-level of the communication and saying “Come on, man.”
I’m not advocating trying for kenshō. You can’t try for it in any useful way. That’s not how it works. I honestly don’t care whether I persuade anyone of its value, because it does not matter whether you try for it. Or rather, if it does matter, it does so by making you obsessed in a way that can actually block the seeing. So, there isn’t really any good benefit to fighting with your analysis to try to persuade you of its value.
I understand where you are coming from. Efforting blocks realisation and kenshō doesn’t come from discursive thought—those are common traps. This is good advice for the experienced meditation practitioner. The practitioner that has already seen the benefit practice brings and has the momentum built up to carry them through difficult periods. Further effort and analysis blocks progress after a point.
The typical lesswronger is a beginner and needs the exact opposite advice. Kenshō needs to be advocated for because they need a reason to practice instead of doing something else. And they need to know that trying for it is useful so that they can establish the right discipline and mental habits.
You don’t need to speak about Kenshō to talk about the value of meditation. You can advocate for taking up a meditation practice with arguments that are much simpler and that are about less time investment.
I like you, and I think you like me, and I’d prefer we remember that even if we’re talking online through text this time!
Ah, yes, I didn’t respond to you as the person I know and have a relationship with in my comment. I regularly find it hard to connect online commenting to the person I’m responding to, and I think my comment does read as weirdly challenging. Sorry about that Val.
Nonetheless, there are important trade-offs against being social on a place like LessWrong—for example, I don’t want to take up the time of the hundreds of people who read the comments, and in general, I won’t be having a lot of social discussion in the comments. For example, I’ve just cut from this comment two paragraphs of my thought processes that wrote such an impersonal original comment (will send you them privately).
I just spent a while not talking about anything in your post, so I’ll finish and not write more comments here (if you want Val, I’m happy to discuss this more offline). I’ll now write an object level response to your comment :-)
Added: I might not, it’s 6am here. I should really sleep soon.
I’m at the moment wondering a bit whether I have what you are pointing at. What you are saying doesn’t feel strange to me at all.
I can conceptually relate to most what you wrote. I have no problem holding space in the way you describe where I don’t suffer. On the other hand, I’m filled with various unresolved stuff that drains energy. I remember commenting in the post you wrote about grief on LW about the day I processed the fact my father died. When I’m faced with strong emotions and there’s no other way to deal with them, I’m forced to go to that mental state ;) but on a daily basis I frequently distract myself in various forms.
As far as interpreting the reaction of most people to your post happens to be, I don’t see it as showing that the post isn’t effectful. If it’s effectful than my general model of how things in this nature are learned suggests that it will take months or years for readers to understand.
It’s plausible that in 6 months someone who read this post now goes: “Ah, I think that’s what Val meant back then”. That’s just the time frame this takes. People being confused at first is a good sign and the fact that rationalists don’t like that state of mind and comment accordingly is no sign that anything went wrong.
…with the very slight caveat that there are lots of different things one can Look at, once one knows how to Look at all. And that one can get better at Looking, and thus better at coming to understand things that were falling outside of one’s ontology before.
So I don’t know whether you and I see all the same things as a result of Looking.
But it sounds to me like you know something about Looking at all… which fixes the hardest part of the communication gap. :-)
The fact that you recognize you have unresolved stuff that drains energy is actually evidence in favor of you having what Val is pointing at. It’s much better than being completely unaware of it or believing that it’s just how the world is.
I’m not trained in a Buddhist tradition but have gathered my experiences about elsewhere. I have a lot of mental model for various related phenomena.
I have had a meditation experience after which I thought: “I think I have experienced the phenomenological basis on which karma is build.” but I never had a proper Buddhistic teacher. Getting your mind “clean” is an essential part of the Buddhist way and my mind is at the moment anything but “clean”.
Take the mental state of presence that Buddhist monks who have meditated very long have where they don’t have the startle response (besides the Buddhist monks psychopaths also often don’t have the startle response). You need a certain level of mental cleanness for that, that I don’t have. Given what I knew about Val before his development before his enlightment experience, I think it’s plausible that Val has this.
From my perspective it’s plausible that this is part of what Val means with Kenshō.
While we are talking about this. There’s a concept of the “distinction of completion” that I think comes from the Landmark Forum. If anybody here was at the Landmark Forum and can talk in their language I would be very interested in talking.
I’m late to this comment thread. I had to read a lot of the comments (more than once) before it clicked in a way that I’m fairly sure *I recognize what Looking is* and that I already have the skill and use it more than I think is common (but not always or consistently).
“I can form deep, deep pacts with others who know how to Look. This is harder to explain, but I can point to an analogy clearly, I think: if you’re in the cell phone world and you see someone else who has figured out how to look up, there’s a kind of deep collaboration you two can do, and a level of communication you can have, that others literally cannot understand pre-kenshō. In the real-world analog, this creates room for a kind of bond that lets us sidestep most primate political baloney, because there’s common knowledge that we can both Look at all that stuff, and that that’s not what’s important.”
Now that I have a name/concept-shape for this “skill” of Looking, that paragraph brings up a lot of feelings of longing for me. These bonds are what I’ve rarely experienced and what feels to me like what I want out of interpersonal relationships. It’s like most people aren’t awake, or are NPCs, and it gets lonely.
Occasionally finding bits of these bonds is enormously rewarding.
Some comments ask questions about how you can know if someone else is “looking up from their phone.” They want real world examples.
I think you can’t know if someone is doing the real-world analog of “Looking up from their phone” if you don’t interact with them on a level beyond small talk or polite conversation. You won’t pass a stranger on the street and just see it. Looking is a frame of mind, so if you don’t interact with their mental processes, there’s nothing to see.
My personal examples of knowing someone else is Looking are composed of very private conversations that are, like I said, beyond small talk or polite conversation.
I don’t want to get specific, but I can give a vague example interaction:
Imagine a friend is engaging in a behavior that isn’t going well for them. You have an unflattering model of their motives and behavior that you don’t think they’ve considered. If you shared these thoughts with most people, their feelings would be deeply hurt and they may lash out, deny, get defensive, etc. But your friend asks what your thoughts are about what’s going on for them. If you’re both capable of Looking, maybe you can tell them the brutal truth of what you think. You may preface it with “I don’t mean this as a criticism of you, and this might be totally wrong,” and that is also the truth. And when you give them the message they may feel a pang of hurt, but they are able to Look inside and say, “Yes, I can see that too.”
Now imagine the roles are reversed. Your friend has delivered honest feedback and it can sting. But you know the negative emotions don’t matter much. You don’t have to let them high-jack you into indignation. Your trust your friend understands you’re only human and you also trust that they see more than the sum of your flaws. It is immeasurably *safer* feeling to know that they care enough about you to Look at you and try to help you grow as a person.
//end of crappy example
Other examples would not necessarily involve criticism.
I also think the terminology of “it’s okay” is a terrible way to describe the feeling of Looking. It practically begs to have someone argue or get stuck on why things are not okay. I think the phrase I substitute for myself is, “Don’t freak out.” I’m telling myself I don’t have to moralize reality.
What is, is. Don’t freak out! Freaking out doesn’t change reality. You can handle the truth. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
*Just Look up!*
(If I’m totally wrong about what Looking is...feel free to tell me. )
Can you say what it would mean for ‘it’ to not be ‘okay’?
(This has been asked already in another thread, but I have not seen an answer.)
In other words, “it’s okay”… as opposed to what?
Or, to put it yet another way:
I—as far as I know—do not have this ‘Looking’ skill that we’ve been hearing about. I have certainly never meditated, experienced enlightenment, taken hallucinogenic drugs of any sort, or done anything else which might trigger “non-symbolic experiences” of a similar sort (to use the terminology from the paper linked elsethread).
However, I also don’t find myself “freaking out”, “moralizing reality”, or otherwise having any sense that ‘it’, or things-in-general, are “not okay”. Should I? What am I missing?
Edit: To add yet another rephrasing of my question: presumably, you have gained this skill of ‘Looking’ at some point, prior to which time you did not possess it. What, exactly, was “not okay” before that, and how?
I would not personally use the phrases “it is/things are/whatever is okay.” But one way reacting like “it’s not okay” could look is the instinct to make reality retrospectively not be how it is. Denial. We can affect the future, but there’s no use denying what already is.
If the first thing you do is interpret that new info would make the world a bad place (moralizing reality), you may flinch into rationalizing ways it can’t be so before you even notice what you did.
I don’t claim that I gained this skill of ‘Looking’ at some point, prior to which time I did not possess it.
I claim I am recognizing a concept shaped thing that I already did more than average, and am now labelling it with the name Looking. I think I’ve gotten better over time and now that I label it, I think I could practice more deliberately. If I’m totally wrong, there’s still this thing I think I could practice because I’m labelling it now.
I think people are hung up on the meditation/enlightenment idea. It’s not the skill. It’s an old fashioned way to practice. I think the paper being linked is going to confuse more people than it helps.
It is super basic and not as otherworldly or profound as people seem to expect it to be.
Edit: I don’t mean to say it’s basic, so you should already understand. I mean to say it’s basic, and you’re looking for something complicated. Like maybe you are rejecting or will reject the answer even if YOU think of it, or already do Looking, because it’s just not an impressive complicated thing. You’ve invested a lot of effort in understanding this concept, and I wonder if the realization, when/if you get it, will be disappointing. Maybe it will be a relief though.
Bemused exasperation here. I’m grinning as I write this. I wondered if this post would produce this kind of effect… and I hoped not, but it’s not unexpected!
I’m not advocating trying for kenshō. You can’t try for it in any useful way. That’s not how it works. I honestly don’t care whether I persuade anyone of its value, because it does not matter whether you try for it. Or rather, if it does matter, it does so by making you obsessed in a way that can actually block the seeing. So, there isn’t really any good benefit to fighting with your analysis to try to persuade you of its value. That’s all on you!
And I imagine that’s frustrating. And I do apologize; I’m really not trying to be frustrating or vague here. It’s just… well, see the entire opening post!
But to steelman your… hmm, mix of a request and a challenge: I receive you as wanting either for me to give you concrete things learning how to Look has done for me, or to admit I can’t and retract the value of what I’m saying.
That’s a fine want. I really would prefer you just ask though. There’s something a little weird about responding to “Hey, I think there’s something interesting over in those bushes” with “If you want to convince me, here are my requirements.” It adds weird status noise to the conversation. And I like you, and I think you like me, and I’d prefer we remember that even if we’re talking online through text this time!
That aside: I’ll share some concrete things, but I think it’ll come across weird. It’s a bit like if you get mathematical proof, but no one else around you understands it, and are now insisting that you demonstrate how this has helped you do things better in terms they can understand, on pain of rejecting the relevance of what you’re saying. You might be able to muster up some clever thing, at which point you can be deemed a goddamn sorcerer, but you damn well know at the end of that that they still won’t understand proof. You’ll just be magical, or making claims that you’re highly confident of that they don’t know whether to believe.
So, dear sir, I give unto thee crazy shit:
I can cut through confusion enormously more easily now. A huge amount of what Eliezer talks about in the Sequences is actually a lot easier to understand as applications of Looking. Not all of it, and maybe not even most of it: quite a bit of it is training and using a certain kind of mathematical thinking. But the stuff about actually changing your mind is… well, it can’t work reliably by mental/emotional force the way I hear so very many rationalists talking, and it’s now super obvious to me why. It’s really easy if you know how to Look. As in, I think it’s the natural thing you want to do if you can Look at your own mind.
Related: I seem to have developed Looking well enough to track my own subconscious strategies. Turns out, nearly everyone runs sexual or social schemes below conscious awareness for strategic reasons. (This is where “load-bearing bugs” come from, and why meaningful change is so hard.) I’m no exception — and some of my strategies were hurting people I cared about, and I was motivated not to notice. And once I did notice, those same strategies wanted to rearrange to do some kind of remorseful thing that was still in line with the same strategies but had many surface features of a deep emotional realization. Actually Looking made this whole gibberish easy to track and work around. This let me meaningfully mend a relationship with an ex I saw I had badly mistreated such that we’re now very good friends. (I’m still reaching out to others I’ve hurt and working on mending things… but it’s tricky to convey that and how I’ve changed, so this is currently slow-going.)
I’m in the process of restructuring some of the CFAR material to account for what I can now readily see about how minds work. I haven’t been able to convey the core insight, but it does seem to make a pretty deeply profound impact on a lot of people. On the surface it looks something like “No, really, you’re a game theoretic agent” and then following the implications. But the reason for this was because I knew this would impact a particular slice of the CFAR participant population more deeply in a particular way, and I was right. (Doing follow-ups with dear folk from Prague to verify. In many cases it worked slightly better than expected.)
I now have a deep, deep, deep reservoir of energy I can call on whenever I need. I don’t usually do this because I can also tell what the consequences are of using that reservoir. But if I need it, I have no doubt I can just go for 36+ hours at high function. I’ve tested that a few times and it works damn well — but it’s still unkind to my body, so I don’t care to do it.
It’s waaaaaaaay easier for me to hold emotional space for others. Way way way easier. I’m basically not suffering, I see their suffering so very much more clearly, and most of my self-consciousness about being in connection with others is… hmm, I want to say “gone” but maybe “irrelevant” is a better description. I slip in this sometimes, when I forget how to Look and fall into old habits… but that’s happening vanishingly more rarely as time goes on.
I can form deep, deep pacts with others who know how to Look. This is harder to explain, but I can point to an analogy clearly, I think: if you’re in the cell phone world and you see someone else who has figured out how to look up, there’s a kind of deep collaboration you two can do, and a level of communication you can have, that others literally cannot understand pre-kenshō. In the real-world analog, this creates room for a kind of bond that lets us sidestep most primate political baloney, because there’s common knowledge that we can both Look at all that stuff, and that that’s not what’s important.
That’s not exhaustive. Let me know if that hits the type you’re looking for?
Yes. That. That’s much more the thing I want to point at. I don’t care if you or anyone else meditates; that’s just an old, sometimes useful tool for learning to Look.
Your epistemic state makes sense to me. And also… well, to quote my original article:
“And yes, there’s most definitely an “it”. This isn’t just brains getting flooded with feeling-of-profundity without an object. And it totally makes sense that some people think that. Just… from this vantage point, those objections come across a bit like people arguing that science is just another religion. Or more to the point, it’s like trying to convince me that I have no subjective experience: no matter how cunning and logical and well-researched the argument, I’m still here listening to you.”
I don’t have any particularly good ideas for what an alternative goal of this post could be, and would be interested in more elaboration on that. It definitely seems to me that the goal of the post is to teach something, and as is usually required for teaching, to motivate why the thing you are teaching is important. If this post is only for people who are already motivated to learn about the things you describe, then that’s fine, but I did not get that sense from the way it was written.
I was attempting to illustrate an epistemic puzzle, and that there is a known solution, but it is hard to tell people what it is, which is itself part of the puzzle.
It seems many folk are getting caught up in the puzzle instead of zooming out to the meta-level. Which is probably my fault: I still suspect there’s a way I could aim my explanation at the meta-level that would bypass this confusion.
But instead, we’re myred in the confusion. Which is okay; I’m learning, and this whole set of comment threads is doing a beautiful job of illustrating the phenomena I was talking about! If nothing else I’ll be able to use all this to clarify something useful later.
Upon reflection, I think maybe I can spell out the logic of what I was trying to focus on a little more clearly.
There’s this thing, ``flibble’’, that is super hard to understand. Some people come to understand it and can then talk to each other about it. But they can’t explain flibble to pre-understanding folk. There’s some kind of process that’s basically unrelated to the attempts to explain flibble that lets people suddenly get flibble.
It really doesn’t matter what flibble is. The curious thing from an epistemic point of view (to me) is that there seems to be a skill to getting flibble. It looks like it’s a very general “get my ontology to update when I have no damn clue beforehand what the update is” skill. That seems damn useful.
The problem is, that skill is just as subject to non-understandability as flibble is. Which means you need the skill to some extent in order to bootstrap.
I do not care what flibble is. I’m not trying to convince anyone of the value of flibble. I’m trying to point at this puzzle and note that it suggests a really huge goddamn hole in epistemology as we normally talk about it.
It just so happens that flibble, when properly understood, is exactly the same thing as the result of using this skill. That has resulted in some confusion, because a lot of people here think they know something about flibble and are in fact wrong. I tried to spell that out, but that seemed to come across as an argument that flibble as they understood it beforehand is good.
So:
I don’t care about convincing anyone about anything about “enlightenment”.
I think there’s something damn important about Looking.
And even if I can’t convey that “something damn important”, I think there’s something understandable and interesting about the epistemic puzzle.
Does that help?
I want to address this response, because it fits a pattern I’ve seen a few times, which I think is an important aspect of this discussion. Here’s the pattern:
Example 1
“I’ve invented a fascinating new baking technique! With it, I have baked an amazing new cake!”
“An amazing new cake?! Sounds delicious! Could we have a taste?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about the cake, I want to talk about the baking technique.”
Example 2
“I’ve invented an amazing new programming technique! With it, I have developed an awesome new app!”
“An awesome new app?! Sounds cool! Where can we download it?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about the app, I want to talk about the programming technique.”
Example 3
“I’ve come up with a whole new way to write fiction! With it, I have written an incredible novel!”
“An incredible novel?! Sounds wonderful! Could we read it?”
“No, I don’t want to talk about the novel, I want to talk about the new writing method.”
But the only reason we might possibly care about your new baking technique is if it lets us bake amazing cakes. The only reason we might possibly want to hear about your amazing new programming technique is if let us make cool apps. And the only reason we might have to be interested in your thoughts on writing is if we believed that your ideas would let us write incredible fiction.
The only thing that makes us want to hear what you have to say about the meta-level thing, is if we believe your claims about how the meta-level thing leads to the object-level things. (Otherwise, what on earth is the point?)
And the most obvious way to show us that, indeed, the meta-level thing leads to the object-level thing, would be to show us the object-level thing first—which you in fact claim to have, but (frustratingly! inexplicably!) refuse to produce.
After all, it would be different if you had said “I have invented an amazing new baking technique… no, I haven’t used it to bake any delicious cakes, why do you ask?” But you’re not saying that! You tell us that you have a cake! It’s an excellent cake, and is exactly the sort of cake that we could bake, if we used your cool new baking technique…
Of course we want to see the cake. Why wouldn’t you want to show it to us? Not only would we be impressed, but we would certainly want to hear all about how you baked such a culinary wonder. Could you imagine a more receptive audience for your tale of baking techniques?
But you’re holding out on us.
That is why people resist attempts to jump right to the meta level.
I do think there are things in this general topic area that are worth understanding, but the original post and most of the comments have been pretty useless to anyone trying to understand who doesn’t already. Some could even be seen as taunting people over their lack of understanding, which be perfectly frank, I find obnoxious. So I’ll try to give a quick overview of how I understand this while hopefully avoiding those pitfalls.
Take something like learning to wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow at a time, or whistle. These can’t be explained in words, but words and other stimuli can make it more likely that you’ll stumble onto the correct action. Innate aptitude is probably a factor, too.
If you think of your current level of happiness or euphoria (to pick a simple example) as the output of a function with various inputs, some of these inputs can be changed through voluntarily mental actions that similarly can’t be directly explained in words and aren’t obvious. Things like meditating long enough with correct technique can cause people to stumble across the way to do this. Some of the inputs can be changed about as easily as wiggling your ears, while others can be much more difficult or apparently impossible, maybe analogous to re-learning motor functions after a stroke.
My guess as to what’s being referred to as “Looking” amounts to having enough experience with this sort of activity that the mental state you happen to be in right now—even though it still colors everything you think and experience to more-or-less the same extent as ever—having directly confirmed that it can be voluntarily changed given the appropriate effort, stops seeming as particularly special, or magical, or all-encompassing as it used to, and that’s the source of the “looking up from the screen” and “getting out of the car” metaphors.
(I mean “mental state” in an expansive way, including everything from your current mood to your beliefs about the nature of the universe to whether or not you’re currently hallucinating.)
As for impressive feats, or the “cake,” I’m pretty sure they aren’t really all that impressive. There’s low-hanging fruit that can be personally fulfilling but not particularly outwardly impressive, and the high-hanging fruit mostly amounts to an odd form of wireheading that leaves you outwardly functional but without a sense of self or of caring about anything.
This is one of the most useful comments in this thread; there’s not much to say in response to most of it, except “that makes a lot of sense, thank you”. So instead, here’s some commentary to a part of this that I object to:
You may not be able to explain how to do these things in words. But you can certainly explain in words what these things are (for one of them, you just did)! And certainly, if you wiggle your ears, raise one eyebrow, or whistle, that you are doing something unusual (and what you are doing) will be blindingly obvious, without you even needing to point it out.
And so it would be a perfectly unsurprising scenario, if you and I were having an ordinary conversation, and suddenly you whistled (suppose I have never heard anyone whistle before):
clone of saturn: whistles
Said: Whoa! What… what did you just do?? You just made, like, a weird sound!
clone of saturn: yeah, it’s called ‘whistling’
Said: Gosh! Can you do it again?
clone of saturn: whistles again
Said: … fascinating! How did you do that? Could I do that??
clone of saturn: well… it might be hard to explain…
Said: Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I have no idea how I’d go about doing that…! That sure is a really cool thing you can do, though…
Obviously, this is nothing even remotely like the ‘Looking’ scenario, where not only are we merely told that its practitioners can do cool and unusual things (instead of being shown those things, even when we ask them to show us), but the alleged things they can do are so vague and poorly-explained that it’s unclear how we would even notice that they were doing those things, even if we were in their physical presence.
Edit: Of course you’ve already explained the reason for this disanalogy—why no impressive feats may be produced by those who are able to ‘Look’. I’m merely calling attention to it—that it’s not merely a “can’t explain in words, because hard-to-verbalize procedural knowledge” situation, of the ‘whistling’ or ‘ear-wiggling’ sort.
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.
---
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.
FWIW, this aptly describes my own adverse reaction to the OP. “I have this great insight, but I not only can’t explain it to you, but I’m going to spend the balance of my time explaining why you couldn’t understand it if I tried to explain it” sounds awfully close to bulveristic stories like, “If only you weren’t blinded by sin, you too would see the glory of the coming of the lord”.
That the object level benefits offered seem to be idiographic self-exhaltations augur still poorer (i.e. I cut through confusion so much more easily now (no examples provided); I have much greater reserves to do stuff; I can form much deeper pacts with others who, like I, can See the Truth.) I recall the ‘case’ for Ander’s Connection Theory was of a similar type. But at least connection theory at least sketched something like a theory to consider on its merits.
There needs to be either some object-level description (i.e. “This is what Looking is”), or—if that really isn’t possible—demonstration of good results (i.e. “Here’s a great post on a CFAR-adjecent topic, and this was thanks to Looking.”) Otherwise, the recondite and the obscurantist look very much alike.
I theorize that you’re experiencing at least two different common, related, yet almost opposed mental re-organizations.
One, which I approve of, accounts for many of the effects you describe under “Bemused exasperation here...”. It sounds similar to what I’ve gotten from writing fiction.
Writing fiction is, mostly, thinking, with focus, persistence, and patience, about other people, often looking into yourself to try to find some point of connection that will enable you to understand them. This isn’t quantifiable, at least not to me; but I would still call it analytic. I don’t think there’s anything mysterious about it, nor anything especially difficult other than (A) caring about other individuals—not other people, in the abstract, but about particular, non-abstract individuals—and (B) acquiring the motivation and energy to think long and hard about them. Writing fiction is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I don’t find it as mentally draining per minute as chess, though perhaps that’s because I’m not very interested in chess. But one does it for weeks on end, not just hours.
(What I’ve just described applies only to the naturalist school of fiction, which says that fiction studies about particular, realistic individuals in particular situations in order to query our own worldview. The opposed, idealistic school of fiction says that fiction presents archetypes as instructional examples in order to promulgate your own worldview.)
The other thing, your “flibble”, sounds to me like the common effect, seen in nearly all religions and philosophies, of a drastic simplification of epistemology, when one blinds oneself to certain kinds of thoughts and collapses one’s ontology into a simpler world model, in order to produce a closed, self-consistent, over-simplified view of the world. Platonists, Christians, Hegelians, Marxists, Nazis, post-modernists, and SJWs each have a drastically-simplified view of what is in the world and how it operates, which always includes “facts” and techniques which discount all evidence to the contrary.
For example, the Buddhist / Hindu / Socratic / post-modernist technique of deconstruction relies on an over-simplified concept of what concepts and categories are—that they must have a clearly delineated boundary, or else must not exist at all. This goes along with an over-simplified logocentric conception of Truth, which claims that any claim stated in human language must be either True (necessarily, provably, 100% of the time) or False (necessarily, etc.), disregarding both context and the slipperiness of words. From there, they either choose dualism (this system really works and we must find out what is True: Plato, Christians, Hegel, Marx) or monism (our ontology is obviously broken and there is no true or false, no right or wrong, no you or me: Buddhism, Hinduism, Parmenides, Nazis, Foucault, Derrida, and other post-modernists). Nearly all of Western and Eastern philosophy is built on this misunderstanding of reality.
For another example, phenomenologists (including Heidegger), Nazis, and SJWs use the concept of “lived experience” to deny that quantified empirical observations have any epistemological value. This is how they undermine the authority of science, and elevate violence and censorship over reasoned debate as a way of resolving disagreements.
A third example is the claim, made by Parmenides, Plato, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and too many others to name, that the senses are misleading. This argument begins with the observation that every now and then, maybe one time in a million—say, when seeing a mirage in the desert, or a stick underwater (the most-frequent examples)--the senses mislead you. Then it concludes the senses are always wrong, and assumes that reason is always 100% reliable despite the obvious fact that no 2 philosophers have ever agreed with each other using abstract reason as a guide. It’s a monumentally stupid claim, but once one has accepted it, one can’t get rid of it, because all of the evidence that one should do so is now ruled out.
Derrida’s statement “there is no outside text” is another argument that observational evidence should be ignored, and that rather than objective quantified evidence, epistemology should be based on dialectic. In practice this means that a claim is considered proven once enough people talk about it. This is the epistemology of German idealism and post-modernism. This is why post-modernists continually talk about claims having been “proven” when a literature search can’t turn up a single argument supporting their claims; they are simply accepted as “the text” because they’ve been repeated enough. (Barthes’ “Death of the Author” is the clearest example: its origin is universally acknowledged to be Barthes’ paper of that title; yet that paper makes no arguments in favor of its thesis, but rather asserts that everyone already knows it.) Needless to say, once someone has accepted this belief, their belief system is invulnerable to any good argument, which would necessarily involve facts and observations.
The “looking up” is usually a looking away from the world and ignoring those complicating factors which make simple solutions unworkable. Your “flibble” is probably not the addition of some new understanding, but the cutting away and denial of some of the complexities of life to create a self-consistent view of the world.
Genuine enlightenment, the kind provided by the Enlightenment, or by understanding calculus, or nominalism, isn’t non-understandable. It doesn’t require any sudden leap, because it can be explained piece by piece.
There are some insights which must be experienced, such as that of learning to whistle, or ride a bicycle, or feeling your voice resonate in your sinuses for the first time when trying to learn to sing. These are all slightly mysterious; even after learning, you can’t communicate them verbally. But none of them have the grand, sweeping scale of changes in epistemology, which is the sort of thing you’re talking about, and which, I think, must necessarily always be explainable, on the grounds that the epistemology we’ve already got isn’t completely useless.
Your perception of needing to make a quantum leap in epistemology sounds like Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith”, and is symptomatic not of a gain of knowledge, but a rejection of knowledge. This rejection seems like foolishness beforehand (because it is), but like wisdom after making it (because now everything “makes sense”).
Escaping from such a trap, after having fallen into it, is even harder than making the leap of faith that constructed the trap. I was raised in an evangelical family, who went to an evangelical church, had evangelical friends, read evangelical books, and went on evangelical vacations. I’ve known thousands of evangelicals throughout my life, and not one of them other than I rejected their faith.
Genuine enlightenment doesn’t feel like suddenly understanding everything. It feels like suddenly realizing how much you don’t understand.
A+ to flibble analogy. I found this story about flibble much easier to understand and reason about than the OP.
Oh! If I followed you, that’s much clearer.
Here’s some words that are wrong but I think close:
Is that sort of what you meant? If not, I’ll tap out for now until your next post.
That is damn close, yes.
The main point of contention I have is that I’m not trying to get people to experience enlightenment. I’m trying to have people notice that the fact that (a) enlightenment is a real thing and (b) they can’t understand it via explanations, indicates something really damn important about limits in the kind of epistemology we normally talk about here.
And, it looks like Looking is a way of patching those limitations. So it seems worth considering.
Right. I’ll repeat (in advance of your follow-up post) that while it’s interesting to note that I can’t understanding enlightenment via explanation (and that englightenment is a real thing), this is still not enough to suggest that it’s worth exploring—even if it helps me understand other things like enlightenment.
For example, there are many deep skills where the experience of the skill is not amenable to communication via text, yet the skill and experience are definitely real. As someone who has studied classical music for a decade, I’m not able to convey the experience of playing a Bach prelude to you via text. I can imagine similar things for great sports players, or other experts.
This alone doesn’t (I think) suggest anything too important about epistemology. I await your next post with evidence about why Looking does have something important to say about epistemology!
Well… your epistemic state makes sense…
*sigh*
Two points:
The analogy breaks down because you don’t need to be able to play a Bach prelude in order to listen to someone else playing it. What would it be like, for you, if that were the world we were in? Can you imagine what it would be like to try to convey to pre-music folk even that music is real and that it might be worth learning how to listen to it? And if that were something you could readily see about how people cannot see something that is so obviously real to you… wouldn’t that cause a more general worry about the epistemic state of the species? For that matter, how would you come to notice things like music that YOU can’t yet understand this way?
The next post isn’t about evidence about why Looking has something important to say about epistemology. It’s a model of how I have done several things like reach kensho, and the model has been refined as a result of what I’ve come to see as a result of Looking. So, I don’t think you’re going to find it scratches that itch. I expect the parts that I can convey that came from Looking won’t themselves seem like they require Looking, so the fact that I had to transcend my own epistemic state to get there won’t be visible. Alas.
This analogy is capturing my current understanding of this post and its various comments pretty well: Looking is like music, in that it is a difficult, voluntaryish act of observing and manipulating hidden mental states. This will result in wireheading, among other things, but it might be sometimes useful. (Note that music is also wireheading, but it can still be useful in narrow contexts.)
Cool.
FWIW, I’ve come to think that wireheading is an anti-concept as applied to humans. It’s one of those “presume the conclusion” type mental movements. In practice it seems to act like a back door for arguments based on belief residue like the Protestant work ethic / “pleasure is sinful” stuff.
(A little more concretely: It makes sense to talk about some system engaging in wireheading only when there’s a goal imposed from outside the system. It’s like glorified Goodharting. But if the goals come from within the system, it stops being clear what “wireheading” means. On the inside it might feel like “Oh, I just found a vastly easier way to get what I want — and what I want wasn’t what I thought I wanted!” Without an external evaluation criterion, that actually just becomes correct.)
With that said, I think I intuit what you mean by calling music and Looking “wireheading”. I don’t mean to dismiss that. Stuff like, if you meditate enough to get Great Insights™ such that you don’t bother to eat food anymore and you die, that seems like a pretty dramatic failure and kind of throws those “insights” into question.
An interesting fact came to my mind; music that affects one’s mental state is forbidden in Islam.
Perhaps the reason this theme of “sinful pleasure” keeps repeating is the observation that pleasure is a reward signal that does not quite match the utility functions of the conscious mind. At least, that has always been the key motivator of this idea subspace to me.
I’m confused. From your description, I thought that Looking was the same thing as Enlightenment, but now you’re saying you only care about convincing us about Looking, not “enlightenment”?
Looking isn’t enlightenment, it’s a practice for getting there (and getting to enlightenment isn’t the only thing that you can use it for).
Best mapped in the very dense book, “pointing out the great way”.
One path to enlightenment is to provide a moment of pure clear seeing (a state of mind) and align the rest of the mind with the path back there. Then let the result play out.
What do you mean by “pure clear seeing”?
(Context—Digging up a 5 year old post...) The idea of pure clear seeing, is a momentary state of experience which … wait I said this above.
Maybe it’s a bit like finally “getting” a math equation. It seemed confusing for a while, then it seemed to not make sense, and then clear seeing … at least in the mental understanding sense. In my experience, the subjective sense of “pure clear seeing” extends from literal visual stimuli appearing sharper and vivid, through emotional clarity, to mental constructs being sharp and vivid in the mind’s eye as well.
I appreciate you writing the list of examples, but also don’t find them currently particularly compelling, mostly because they are hard to verify from my current perspective (which is fine and the real value might just be hard to communicate).
If I say that a benefit is a feeling of enormous peace and relief, you’ll have a hard time verifying that too. Seems to me like you’re Goodharting on what you’re allowing to be compelling.
I’m really quite disheartened that you find the value of e.g. mending a long-hurt relationship to be “hard to communicate”. That’s… I hurt for you.
I have very high priors on people making up post-hoc stories about the things that happened to them, and the reasons for why they happened. While I don’t disbelieve that a long-hurt relationship of yours has gotten better, I am very skeptical of any specific story you tell of how it has come to that, and so don’t really take that account to be super strong evidence.
You can frame it as a “lemons problem”, or you can frame it as an inevitable result of information assymetries, but in either case this makes benefits like the ones you describe hard to communicate.
This would make sense to me applied to a generic person about whom you know very little; in context it feels to me like you’re outside viewing too hard here. It may be socially much less comfortable to give an inside view description of why you don’t find Val’s comments persuasive, so you don’t need to interpret this as a request for such a description, but this strikes me as reasoning that’s been optimized for defensibility instead of truth-seeking and that seems worth pointing out.
What I know about Val does not make me update downwards particularly strongly about the tendency to make up post-hoc stories. Very few people strike me as being particularly more trustworthy in that direction, which in itself might be a failure of outside-viewing too hard, but that’s definitely my considered epistemic state, taking into account what I know about Val.
(May it be said that my general distrust of people having developed real rationality skills has been a source of disagreement with many, and some source of personal tension between me and others, including me and Val in the past.)
[Meta note to onlookers who seem to have maybe downvoted Qiaochu’s comment]
I think a comment like the one Qiaochu wrote would indeed be out of place and weird for people who didn’t have a personal relationship with me, but given the kind of relationship me and Qiaochu do have, I found the comment to be well-placed and helpful, and expect that the general algorithm of highlighting these potential faults in my thinking patterns will be very useful for me in the long-run, if executed by Qiaochu.
Thanks Oli, I appreciate your candor and your support.
Ah. I didn’t realize you were referring to information asymmetry. That makes sense to me.
I still think you’re doing the updating math wrong. Qiaochu’s thing about you outside-view-ing too hard rings true from where I stand. But I think this is an epistemic disagreement you and I have had for way longer than four months. So… I guess my examples don’t get to be compelling to you. Oh well.
This seems like a reasonable request, and if the value of mathematical/algebraic reasoning had not been presented to me, I would have not invested as many hours as I have into learning math.
I think, though I haven’t tried too much, it’s at least in principle not that difficult to explain the value of mathematical proof to new people: Either give them a bunch of false proofs and let them deal with the confusion, or give them any of the dozens of exercises in Thinking Physics (which are themselves pretty well-motivated) and highlight how an understanding of mathematical proof would help them solve the problems. I am interested in being given a concrete problem, of the nature that Thinking Physics provides, that I could solve more easily with the tools/perspective you describe.
I’m a bit frustrated with you, Oli. I don’t think you’re engaging with the hypothetical in good faith.
A huge portion of my math teaching experience was with preservice elementary and middle school teachers. These were people who would come to my math class as part of a program to get a credential, because they like kids and want to teach kids. And most of them are at best bored of math.
They really didn’t get proof. Proofs were a kind of social ritual. Conveying to them what the value of proving is was not on the table; they did proofs in order to navigate being graded. The only way I was able to get them to engage meaningfully with math was to point out to them that their knowledge of math and good math teaching would impact their students.
I’m guessing most of your math teaching experience is with UC Berkeley student caliber, yes? Of course you can convey proof to someone like that. Or someone like you.
If you imagine you’re in a world where the people around you are more gruff mechanic types, or caring “people-oriented” types, etc., who don’t understand what analytical thinking is… then you’ll find yourself in the position I’m talking about. Giving them Thinking Physics type problems won’t work because they won’t engage with them. After all, you haven’t convinced them of the value of proof-based thinking! You have to show them something that they consider practical.
Please work with me here, Oli. I know you’re smart enough not to have needed me to spell out all of the above. Please turn off the “I must show my rational analysis skills by coming up with a sharp counterargument to literally everything” stuff and actually try to see my point?
I like that question. It’s a tricky one, because knowledge of physics isn’t enough to generate Thinking Physics type puzzles. Likewise, I don’t know if I can give you a good puzzle for Looking off the top of my head. I’ll think on that and see if I can come up with something.
Though I warn, even if I do come up with something, I expect you’ll not find it satisfying. E.g., koans are a classic example of puzzles that are vastly easier to solve by Looking than by normal thinking, but Less Wrong style rationality now has a special toolset for hacking some koans apart that zen masters would consider totally and completely missing the point but give rationalists a kind of pride as though their toolset is doing something even better than answering the koans through Looking. (“Ah, but maybe it is better! After all, statistics and logic and blah blah blah!” :-P )
But… I will try.
Yes, I don’t think it is possible to convey the value that “understanding proof” provides to everyone. But even for someone who cannot easily understand, asking to be shown the value is a very reasonable response, and if they cannot be shown the value, it makes sense for them to not spend their time learning mathematical proof. Trying to teach them proof, without them seeing any value in it, seems doomed to failure.
I can imagine being in a world where it is similarly hard for me to understand the value of kensho. But in that world the necessary first step for me learning, is to be motivated to learn. As I said, it seems fine if the target audience for this post is not me. And it seems plausible, though obviously sad to me, that my mind is shaped so that I can not understand the value without spending dozens of hours on good faith on following your argument along. And if you continue writing this post-series, I will try to seriously engage with the things you are describing, even without seeing the value directly, because I do think you have some interesting perspectives and this whole area might have some value in it.
What I am trying to say is that for the goal of making me understand kensho, the most effective next step for you, would be to try to show me the value. And you might expect that not to work, or that might simply not be your goal, and that’s completely fine. And in that case I will try to understand the things you are pointing at anyways, but I won’t spend more than half an hour per post that you write. And if that won’t be enough, then I will leave with a mostly unchanged epistemic state, which would make me obviously a bit sad.
I think that a) Val has obtained a real and valuable skill, b) Oli is engaging in good faith and making a reasonable request, and c) that there is a type of post that Val could conceivably write which Oli would find satisfactory.
I hope to eventually prove this by achieving enough skill in this area myself (making the assumption I’m correct in understand what Val’s skill is), obtaining the value, and then conveying this in a convincing manner such that anyone reasoning as Oli does is motivated by my case.
Thanks! Okay, some pointers :) You asked for them!
Your writing style is characteristcally evocative—the kind of writing I’d use to point at the majesty of stars, the tragedy of death, and the grandeur of all that could be. It’s emotional, and that is perhaps both its strength and its weakness.
You have the right style to conjure strong feelings around things one already believes and endorses (perfect for Solstice), but perhaps less so to convince people of things they’re skeptical of. A pastor’s rousing sermon about Jesus’s love for all mankind, while moving to his congregation, does little to convince me about the matter.
Attitude
I emphatically reject this. You’ve observed that you don’t feel understood when you explain your experience and inferred that this is a deficiency on the part of the listener rather than the explainer. I think that’s the wrong inference, even if many explainers have struggled similarly. Explaining is hard. But even supposing you are completely right, most listeners are not going to respond charitably to claims of “you couldn’t possibly understand”. (I’ll be directly harsh and say I think accusing someone of not engaging in good faith rather than doubting your own communication is suggestive of the wrong attitude.)
Rightly or wrongly, beneath the post there is an undertone with a few sentiments: “Oh my god, guys!!”, “This is something really, really important and you couldn’t possibly understand, I’m frustrated”, and “You don’t get it! Only special people get it.” (And perhaps a hint of enjoying the fact you have a special secret that others don’t. We’re all human, after all.)
The tone I think would be persuasive is along the lines of “I think I’m onto something big, I think it’s had big benefits, I’d like you too benefit too, this is difficult to convey, but please hear out my best case.”
Content
At the end of the day, I think this is about providing a clear and solid case for why you believe what you believe. Sketching out it lightly, the case I might make could look like:
Listeners might then doubt any of the pieces. They might be incredulous that I experienced such exteme benefits (your claims are pretty extreme), they might doubt that even if I experienced these benefits, that they were attritutable to what I’m claiming is the cause (rather than say, placebo or mania), or they might find my model implausible (brains don’t work that way!). But at least if I have a 3rd person, mechanistic model, we can argue about its correctness.
Maybe I should add that we can analogize Kensho/enlightenment to consciousness. If we imagine some unconscious AIs modelling the possible existence, possible purpose, and expected observations you would get if humans have this “consciousness” thing, I think they could reasonably do that even if there was no way for them to experience consciousness from the inside with their own minds. They could talk about how it worked and what its benefits were without “seeing” it from the inside. I think they could use that understanding to decide if they want to self-modify to have consciousness, and that a convincing case could be made “from the outside”.
Summing up a rambly response, I think a good post on enlightenment has at least one of the following:
1) Your observations, inferences, and why the reader should trust them.
2) A 3rd party perspective, mechanistic model for how enlightenment works and the resultant predictions.
To close, the post I’d write would large be this is what I’ve experienced, this is the evidence, and this is my model for WHY.
One more pointer—clarity on the purpose of a post is paramount. From your comments, it seems like a few different purposes got mixed in:
a) Kensho/Looking are very powerful, I want to motivate you to try them.
b) There is a puzzle around communicating things which you can only conceptually understand once you’ve experienced them. (I’d focus mostly on the puzzle and make it clear Kensho is but an example in this post.)
There’s a dictum: “1) Tell them what you’re going to tell them, 2) Tell them, 3) Tell them what you’ve told them.” Going by your CFAR classes too, I feel like you don’t like telling people what you’re going to tell them (you even want them to be confused). I think this unsurprisingly results in confusion.
Thanks, this is clear and appreciated.
I do feel some exasperation. You’re right in picking up on that.
My experience is that even when I’m not exasperated, this doesn’t convey to people who haven’t done any Looking. I don’t mean that as a judgment against anyone; it’s just a really strong phenomenon, and I think it’s getting conflated with my frustration.
But I’ll take your push-back seriously and reflect on this.
Thanks. :-)
Even if the believe that Valentine has actually got those extreme benefits that’s going to make them believe that Valentine is doing something special and not something very basic.
In New Age circles you have plenty of people who believes in the magical powers of enlightment and who spent years searching for it with nothing to show for it. The openness about making extreme claims is one of the key differences that distinguishes New Age thinking from other spiritual traditions and the empiric results of it are poor.
Appreciation for you, Ruby. :-)
I’m honestly flummoxed about how to create the type of post you’re suggesting. Given the clarity of everything else you’ve written here about this, I’m inclined to believe you. And I’d much like to write that post, or see it written. Any pointers?
I didn’t say, or think, that Ben’s response was unreasonable. I was trying to illustrate via analogy why giving him what he was asking for was going to be extremely hard.
I also wasn’t trying to convince Ben, or anyone else, to seek kensho or do meditation or anything of the sort. I had hoped that the self-reference of the problem would encourage some people to want to learn to Look, which is why I gave some guidelines at the end for going in that direction if one wants. Unfortunately, it seems that people who don’t know how to intentionally Look literally cannot conceptually understand what Looking is for, so if y’all need that before you’ll try (which is understandable but still kind of frustrating from over here), then I guess you ain’t tryin’!
…at least, not consciously as a result of this post.
>”actually try to see my point?”
How do you think that would help? :P
I think what I was trying to say doesn’t require Looking to understand. The analogy of conveying the value of proof should make sense even if what it’s analogous to doesn’t.
My frustration with Oli there was about him arguing with the analogy rather than using the analogy to try to understand what I was saying. This is a communication problem I’ve had with him in person too, so I was hoping to cut through the whole process by pointing at the meta-level of the communication and saying “Come on, man.”
I understand where you are coming from. Efforting blocks realisation and kenshō doesn’t come from discursive thought—those are common traps. This is good advice for the experienced meditation practitioner. The practitioner that has already seen the benefit practice brings and has the momentum built up to carry them through difficult periods. Further effort and analysis blocks progress after a point.
The typical lesswronger is a beginner and needs the exact opposite advice. Kenshō needs to be advocated for because they need a reason to practice instead of doing something else. And they need to know that trying for it is useful so that they can establish the right discipline and mental habits.
You don’t need to speak about Kenshō to talk about the value of meditation. You can advocate for taking up a meditation practice with arguments that are much simpler and that are about less time investment.
Ah, yes, I didn’t respond to you as the person I know and have a relationship with in my comment. I regularly find it hard to connect online commenting to the person I’m responding to, and I think my comment does read as weirdly challenging. Sorry about that Val.
Nonetheless, there are important trade-offs against being social on a place like LessWrong—for example, I don’t want to take up the time of the hundreds of people who read the comments, and in general, I won’t be having a lot of social discussion in the comments. For example, I’ve just cut from this comment two paragraphs of my thought processes that wrote such an impersonal original comment (will send you them privately).
I just spent a while not talking about anything in your post, so I’ll finish and not write more comments here (if you want Val, I’m happy to discuss this more offline). I’ll now write an object level response to your comment :-)
Added: I might not, it’s 6am here. I should really sleep soon.
I’m at the moment wondering a bit whether I have what you are pointing at. What you are saying doesn’t feel strange to me at all.
I can conceptually relate to most what you wrote. I have no problem holding space in the way you describe where I don’t suffer. On the other hand, I’m filled with various unresolved stuff that drains energy. I remember commenting in the post you wrote about grief on LW about the day I processed the fact my father died. When I’m faced with strong emotions and there’s no other way to deal with them, I’m forced to go to that mental state ;) but on a daily basis I frequently distract myself in various forms.
As far as interpreting the reaction of most people to your post happens to be, I don’t see it as showing that the post isn’t effectful. If it’s effectful than my general model of how things in this nature are learned suggests that it will take months or years for readers to understand.
It’s plausible that in 6 months someone who read this post now goes: “Ah, I think that’s what Val meant back then”. That’s just the time frame this takes. People being confused at first is a good sign and the fact that rationalists don’t like that state of mind and comment accordingly is no sign that anything went wrong.
Sounds to me like you have “it”.
…with the very slight caveat that there are lots of different things one can Look at, once one knows how to Look at all. And that one can get better at Looking, and thus better at coming to understand things that were falling outside of one’s ontology before.
So I don’t know whether you and I see all the same things as a result of Looking.
But it sounds to me like you know something about Looking at all… which fixes the hardest part of the communication gap. :-)
The fact that you recognize you have unresolved stuff that drains energy is actually evidence in favor of you having what Val is pointing at. It’s much better than being completely unaware of it or believing that it’s just how the world is.
I’m not trained in a Buddhist tradition but have gathered my experiences about elsewhere. I have a lot of mental model for various related phenomena.
I have had a meditation experience after which I thought: “I think I have experienced the phenomenological basis on which karma is build.” but I never had a proper Buddhistic teacher. Getting your mind “clean” is an essential part of the Buddhist way and my mind is at the moment anything but “clean”.
Take the mental state of presence that Buddhist monks who have meditated very long have where they don’t have the startle response (besides the Buddhist monks psychopaths also often don’t have the startle response). You need a certain level of mental cleanness for that, that I don’t have. Given what I knew about Val before his development before his enlightment experience, I think it’s plausible that Val has this.
From my perspective it’s plausible that this is part of what Val means with Kenshō.
While we are talking about this. There’s a concept of the “distinction of completion” that I think comes from the Landmark Forum. If anybody here was at the Landmark Forum and can talk in their language I would be very interested in talking.
I’m late to this comment thread. I had to read a lot of the comments (more than once) before it clicked in a way that I’m fairly sure *I recognize what Looking is* and that I already have the skill and use it more than I think is common (but not always or consistently).
“I can form deep, deep pacts with others who know how to Look. This is harder to explain, but I can point to an analogy clearly, I think: if you’re in the cell phone world and you see someone else who has figured out how to look up, there’s a kind of deep collaboration you two can do, and a level of communication you can have, that others literally cannot understand pre-kenshō. In the real-world analog, this creates room for a kind of bond that lets us sidestep most primate political baloney, because there’s common knowledge that we can both Look at all that stuff, and that that’s not what’s important.”
Now that I have a name/concept-shape for this “skill” of Looking, that paragraph brings up a lot of feelings of longing for me. These bonds are what I’ve rarely experienced and what feels to me like what I want out of interpersonal relationships. It’s like most people aren’t awake, or are NPCs, and it gets lonely.
Occasionally finding bits of these bonds is enormously rewarding.
Some comments ask questions about how you can know if someone else is “looking up from their phone.” They want real world examples.
I think you can’t know if someone is doing the real-world analog of “Looking up from their phone” if you don’t interact with them on a level beyond small talk or polite conversation. You won’t pass a stranger on the street and just see it. Looking is a frame of mind, so if you don’t interact with their mental processes, there’s nothing to see.
My personal examples of knowing someone else is Looking are composed of very private conversations that are, like I said, beyond small talk or polite conversation.
I don’t want to get specific, but I can give a vague example interaction:
Imagine a friend is engaging in a behavior that isn’t going well for them. You have an unflattering model of their motives and behavior that you don’t think they’ve considered. If you shared these thoughts with most people, their feelings would be deeply hurt and they may lash out, deny, get defensive, etc. But your friend asks what your thoughts are about what’s going on for them. If you’re both capable of Looking, maybe you can tell them the brutal truth of what you think. You may preface it with “I don’t mean this as a criticism of you, and this might be totally wrong,” and that is also the truth. And when you give them the message they may feel a pang of hurt, but they are able to Look inside and say, “Yes, I can see that too.”
Now imagine the roles are reversed. Your friend has delivered honest feedback and it can sting. But you know the negative emotions don’t matter much. You don’t have to let them high-jack you into indignation. Your trust your friend understands you’re only human and you also trust that they see more than the sum of your flaws. It is immeasurably *safer* feeling to know that they care enough about you to Look at you and try to help you grow as a person.
//end of crappy example
Other examples would not necessarily involve criticism.
I also think the terminology of “it’s okay” is a terrible way to describe the feeling of Looking. It practically begs to have someone argue or get stuck on why things are not okay. I think the phrase I substitute for myself is, “Don’t freak out.” I’m telling myself I don’t have to moralize reality.
What is, is. Don’t freak out! Freaking out doesn’t change reality. You can handle the truth. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
*Just Look up!*
(If I’m totally wrong about what Looking is...feel free to tell me. )
Re: “it’s okay”:
Can you say what it would mean for ‘it’ to not be ‘okay’?
(This has been asked already in another thread, but I have not seen an answer.)
In other words, “it’s okay”… as opposed to what?
Or, to put it yet another way:
I—as far as I know—do not have this ‘Looking’ skill that we’ve been hearing about. I have certainly never meditated, experienced enlightenment, taken hallucinogenic drugs of any sort, or done anything else which might trigger “non-symbolic experiences” of a similar sort (to use the terminology from the paper linked elsethread).
However, I also don’t find myself “freaking out”, “moralizing reality”, or otherwise having any sense that ‘it’, or things-in-general, are “not okay”. Should I? What am I missing?
Edit: To add yet another rephrasing of my question: presumably, you have gained this skill of ‘Looking’ at some point, prior to which time you did not possess it. What, exactly, was “not okay” before that, and how?
I would not personally use the phrases “it is/things are/whatever is okay.” But one way reacting like “it’s not okay” could look is the instinct to make reality retrospectively not be how it is. Denial. We can affect the future, but there’s no use denying what already is.
If the first thing you do is interpret that new info would make the world a bad place (moralizing reality), you may flinch into rationalizing ways it can’t be so before you even notice what you did.
I don’t claim that I gained this skill of ‘Looking’ at some point, prior to which time I did not possess it.
I claim I am recognizing a concept shaped thing that I already did more than average, and am now labelling it with the name Looking. I think I’ve gotten better over time and now that I label it, I think I could practice more deliberately. If I’m totally wrong, there’s still this thing I think I could practice because I’m labelling it now.
I think people are hung up on the meditation/enlightenment idea. It’s not the skill. It’s an old fashioned way to practice. I think the paper being linked is going to confuse more people than it helps.
It is super basic and not as otherworldly or profound as people seem to expect it to be.
Edit: I don’t mean to say it’s basic, so you should already understand. I mean to say it’s basic, and you’re looking for something complicated. Like maybe you are rejecting or will reject the answer even if YOU think of it, or already do Looking, because it’s just not an impressive complicated thing. You’ve invested a lot of effort in understanding this concept, and I wonder if the realization, when/if you get it, will be disappointing. Maybe it will be a relief though.