This is a beautiful comment thread. Too rarely do I get to hear anything at all about people’s inner lives, so too much of my theory of mind is generalizations from one example.
For example, I would never have guessed any of this about reflectivity. Before reading this post, I didn’t think there was such a thing as people who hadn’t “crossed the Rubicon”, except young children. I guess I was completely wrong.
Either I feel reflective but there’s higher level of reflectivity I haven’t reached and can’t even imagine (which I consider unlikely but am including for purposes of fake humility), I’m misunderstanding what is meant by this post, or I’ve just always been reflective as far back as I can remember (6? 7?).
The only explanation I can give for that is that I’ve always had pretty bad obsessive-compulsive disorder which takes the form of completely irrational and inexplicable compulsions to do random things. It was really, really easy to identify those as “external” portions of my brain pestering me, so I could’ve just gotten in the habit of believing that about other things.
As for the original article, it would be easier to parse if I’d ever heard a good reduction of “I”. Godel Escher Bach was brilliant, funny, and fascinating, but for me at least didn’t dissolve this question.
This is a beautiful comment thread. Too rarely do I get to hear anything at all about people’s inner lives, so too much of my theory of mind is generalizations from one example.
For example, I would never have guessed any of this about reflectivity. Before reading this post, I didn’t think there was such a thing as people who hadn’t “crossed the Rubicon”, except young children. I guess I was completely wrong.
Either I feel reflective but there’s higher level of reflectivity I haven’t reached and can’t even imagine (which I consider unlikely but am including for purposes of fake humility), I’m misunderstanding what is meant by this post, or I’ve just always been reflective as far back as I can remember (6? 7?).
The only explanation I can give for that is that I’ve always had pretty bad obsessive-compulsive disorder which takes the form of completely irrational and inexplicable compulsions to do random things. It was really, really easy to identify those as “external” portions of my brain pestering me, so I could’ve just gotten in the habit of believing that about other things.
As for the original article, it would be easier to parse if I’d ever heard a good reduction of “I”. Godel Escher Bach was brilliant, funny, and fascinating, but for me at least didn’t dissolve this question.