Eliezer, A few years ago I sat across from you at dinner and mentioned how much you reminded me of my younger self. I expected, incorrectly, that you would receive this with the appreciation of a person being understood, but saw instead on your face an only partially muted expression of snide mirth. For the next hour you sat quietly as the conversation continued around us, and on my drive home from the Bay Area back to Santa Barbara I spent a bit more time reflecting on the various interactions during the dinner and updating my model of others and you.
For as long as I can remember, well before the age of 4, I’ve always experienced myself from both within and without as you describe. On rare occasions I’ve found someone else who knows what I’m talking about, but I can’t say I’ve ever known anyone closely for whom it’s such a strong and constant part of their subjective experience as it has been for me. The emotions come and go, in all their intensity, but they are both felt and observed. The observations of the observations are also observed, and all this up to typically and noticeably, about 4 levels of abstraction. (Reflected in my natural writing style as well.)
This leads easily and naturally to a model representing a part of oneself dealing with another part of oneself. Which worked well for me up until about the age of 18, when a combination of long-standing unsatisfied questions of an epistemological nature on the nature of induction and entropy, readings (Pirsig, Buckminster Fuller, Hofstadter, Dennett, and some of the more coherent and higher-integrity books on Buddhism) lead me to question and then reorganize my model of my relationship to my world. At some point about 7 years later (about 1985) it hit me one day that I had completely given up belief in an essential “me”, while fully embracing a pragmatic “me”. It was interesting to observe myself then for the next few years; every 6 months or so I would exclaim to myself (if no one else cared to listen) that I could feel more and more pieces settling into a coherent and expanding whole. It was joyful and liberating in that everything worked just as before, but I had to accommodate one less hypothesis, and certain areas of thinking, meta-ethics in particular, became significantly more coherent and extensible. [For example, a piece of the puzzle I have yet to encounter in your writing is the functional self-similarity of agency extended from the “individual” to groups.]
Meanwhile I continued in my career as a technical manager and father, and had yet to read Cosmides and Tooby, Kahneman and Tversky, E.T. Jaynes or Judea Pearl—but when I found them they felt like long lost family.
I know of many reasons why its difficult to nigh impossible to convey this conceptual leap, and hardly any reason why one would want to make it, other than one who’s values already drive him to continue to refine his model of reality.
I offer this reflection on my own development, not as a “me too” or any sort of game of competition of perceived superiority, but only as a gentle reminder that, as you’ve already seen in your previous development, what appears to be a coherent model now, can and likely will be upgraded (not replaced) to accommodate a future, expanded, context of observations.
@Thom: Why don’t you write an article / sequence of articles here, on LW, on your now significantly more coherent and extensive model of reality? I, sincerely, would be really glad to read that.
Eliezer, A few years ago I sat across from you at dinner and mentioned how much you reminded me of my younger self. I expected, incorrectly, that you would receive this with the appreciation of a person being understood, but saw instead on your face an only partially muted expression of snide mirth. For the next hour you sat quietly as the conversation continued around us, and on my drive home from the Bay Area back to Santa Barbara I spent a bit more time reflecting on the various interactions during the dinner and updating my model of others and you.
For as long as I can remember, well before the age of 4, I’ve always experienced myself from both within and without as you describe. On rare occasions I’ve found someone else who knows what I’m talking about, but I can’t say I’ve ever known anyone closely for whom it’s such a strong and constant part of their subjective experience as it has been for me. The emotions come and go, in all their intensity, but they are both felt and observed. The observations of the observations are also observed, and all this up to typically and noticeably, about 4 levels of abstraction. (Reflected in my natural writing style as well.)
This leads easily and naturally to a model representing a part of oneself dealing with another part of oneself. Which worked well for me up until about the age of 18, when a combination of long-standing unsatisfied questions of an epistemological nature on the nature of induction and entropy, readings (Pirsig, Buckminster Fuller, Hofstadter, Dennett, and some of the more coherent and higher-integrity books on Buddhism) lead me to question and then reorganize my model of my relationship to my world. At some point about 7 years later (about 1985) it hit me one day that I had completely given up belief in an essential “me”, while fully embracing a pragmatic “me”. It was interesting to observe myself then for the next few years; every 6 months or so I would exclaim to myself (if no one else cared to listen) that I could feel more and more pieces settling into a coherent and expanding whole. It was joyful and liberating in that everything worked just as before, but I had to accommodate one less hypothesis, and certain areas of thinking, meta-ethics in particular, became significantly more coherent and extensible. [For example, a piece of the puzzle I have yet to encounter in your writing is the functional self-similarity of agency extended from the “individual” to groups.]
Meanwhile I continued in my career as a technical manager and father, and had yet to read Cosmides and Tooby, Kahneman and Tversky, E.T. Jaynes or Judea Pearl—but when I found them they felt like long lost family.
I know of many reasons why its difficult to nigh impossible to convey this conceptual leap, and hardly any reason why one would want to make it, other than one who’s values already drive him to continue to refine his model of reality.
I offer this reflection on my own development, not as a “me too” or any sort of game of competition of perceived superiority, but only as a gentle reminder that, as you’ve already seen in your previous development, what appears to be a coherent model now, can and likely will be upgraded (not replaced) to accommodate a future, expanded, context of observations.
@Thom: Why don’t you write an article / sequence of articles here, on LW, on your now significantly more coherent and extensive model of reality? I, sincerely, would be really glad to read that.
I second Ivan. Beautiful comment, thank you.