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Erfeyah
Karma: 87
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I have to admit that your comment makes a lot of sense from within the rationalist perspective. I just think that the rationalist perspective is quite myopic when it comes to the value of stories. You say:
While this may be a perfectly useful definition in some contexts, it is useless for the kind of debiasing move which moridinamael was talking about. In the context of that conversation, it seems better to interpret “narrative” as a description which is specifically warped by optimizing it to fit the biases of the brain particularly well, as a kind of superstimulus.
You seem to see narrative structures as being useful only as a stimulus [1]. Epistemologically you are using the word ‘warped’ and ‘bias’ that, in my view, betrays your own belief system. A hypothesis that you might want to entertain is that stories contain truths (wisdom) that can not always be rationally articulated, at least for now. That does not mean that all stories contain wisdom, just like statements that presume to be rational do not necessarily achieve their goal. By studying stories you will develop the capacity to understand/obtain wisdom. In other words the stories themselves contain the elements needed to understand them and distinguish wisdom from superstition.
Here is a story through which you can reflect on some aspects of your situation:
There is more Light here
Someone saw Nasrudin searching for something on the ground.
‘What have you lost, Mulla?’ he asked. ‘My key,’ said the Mulla. So they both went down on their knees and looked for it.
After a time the other man asked: ‘Where exactly did you drop it?’
‘In my own house.’
‘Then why are you looking here?’
‘There is more light here than inside my own house.’
[ from Idries Shah—The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin ]
I do recommend Idries Shah’s books of stories. The Nasrudin books are a good start for most people.
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[1] I have to acknowledge here that Valentine seems to treat stories in a similar manner so your comment is definitely justified. I am here expanding on why I believe this to be a restrictive way of thinking.
The claim is deeper than that. Your mind is structured in a way that mirrors narrative structure. You are always in a state (A) and in order to do anything you need to decide on a goal state(B). That is a simplified narrative structure and is not just a way to explain the actions of someone else. It is the way you decide how to act. Check Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning lectures where he goes in depth on the full pattern and then shows how it is found in stories, myth, religion etc. and also, quite astonishingly, in the biological structure of the brain.
I can offer a couple of points on why I consider it a subject of great significance.
[1] On a personal level, which you are of course free to disregard as anecdotal, I had such an experience myself. Twice to be precise. So I know that the source is indeed experiential (“mystical experiences exist”) though I would not yet claim that they necessarily point to an underlying reality. What I would claim is that they certainly need to be explored and not disregarded as a ‘misinterpretation of sensory input’. My personal observation is that (when naturally occurring not chemically induced!) they accompany a psychological breakthrough through an increase in experiential (in contrast to rational) knowledge.
[2] Ancient foundational texts of major civilizations have a mystical basis. Good examples are the Upanishads and the Teo Te Ching but the same experiences can be found in Hebrew, Christian and Sufi mystics, the Buddha, etc. A look at the evidence will immediately reveal that the experience is common among all these traditions and also seems to have been reached independently. We can then observe that this experience is present in the most ancient layers of our mythological structures. The attempt of abstracting the experience into an image can be seen, for example, in symbols such as the Uroboros which point to the underlying archetype. The Uroboros, Brahman and the Tao are all different formulations of the same underlying concept. If we then take seriously Peterson’s hypothesis about the basis of morality in stories things get really interesting; but I am not going to expand on that point here.
These are by no means the only reasons. Indeed the above points seem quite minor when viewed through a deeper familiarity with mystical traditions. But we have to start somewhere I guess.
I do think it is very useful being able to identify these strategies as they occur in our mind. On the related subject of dealing with thoughts themselves (which are in many cases the cause of the emotion) in a healthy manner I have found the book White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts by Daniel Wegner to be extremely useful.
I would like to focus on a minor point in your comment. You say:
So does Peterson sincerely pursue what he sees as the truth? I don’t pretend to know, but one must still consider that other mystics, religious seekers, and pseudoscientists presumably genuinely pursue the truth too, and end up misled. Merely pursuing the truth does not a rationalist make.
The structuring of your sentence implies a world view in which mystics and religious seekers are the same as pseudoscientists and are obviously ‘misled’. Before that you are putting the word ‘mystic’ next to ‘crackpot’ as if they are the same thing. This is particularly interesting to me because an in depth rational examination of mystical material, in conjunction with some personal empirical evidence, indicate that mystical experiences exist and have a powerful transformative effect on the human psyche. So when I hear Peterson taking mysticism seriously I know that I am dealing with a balanced thinker that hasn’t rejected this area before taking the necessary time to understand it. There are scientists and pseudo-scientists, religious seekers and pseudo religious seekers and, maybe, even mystics and pseudo-mystics. I know this is hard to even consider but how can you rationally assess something without taking the hypothesis seriously?
It seems to me that what we are ‘actually in’ is indeed better described as a narrative. Sure you have chosen what you describe as unsuccessful narratives in your life but in order to exist you have to choose a narrative. You say “As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to become alarmed and cautious when I detect myself reasoning by proximity to Protagonist Feelings”. Why have you become alarmed and cautious? Cautious towards what? What danger are you trying to avoid? It seems to me that you have changed your narrative structure to take into account whatever you have chosen to define as that which you do not want to identify with. But you are still in what can be seen as a narrative structure.
Thank you for yet another interesting post!
There is something I find problematic about the Derive method. It seems to require lying convincingly to yourself which I think is a bad idea.
Find a striking piece of advice that you have an aversion to, because you are attached by vanity to your current identity.
Wouldn’t this be labeled in my head as bad advice? If there is a part of myself that identifies it as good advice, and I realise that it is based on vanity, isn’t that enough to accept the advice?
Modify it in a wacky and idiosyncratic way. This can be a useful upgrade, but it doesn’t have to be. Rebrand it to be catchy or personal.
Ok, if I modify it enough maybe I can actually take pride in my reformulation (though I could argue that even this is partly deceitful). But if it ‘doesn’t have to be a useful upgrade’ then I have to rebrand it by lying to myself. As stated above I believe lying to yourself is a very bad idea. I would agree with Jordan Peterson that this would result in pathologising the thinking process.
I understand that this is an attempt to hack the vanity mechanism for motivational purposes. I just think that the more traditional ways of overcoming pride such as 1) observing behavior with honesty, identifying instances of self-inflationary behavior or thought, and 2) practice humility, are better strategies as they are addressing the cause and not the symptom[1].
Thoughts?
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[1] Notice how honesty/sincerity and humility have to be developed together as the one does not work without the other. Apparent humility can actually be disguised vanity etc.
Thank you for your very interesting post Valentine.
I am coming to this topic from a quite different viewpoint than most of the comments I read (did not read them all). That is because I believe I know exactly what you are talking about due to having this experience myself. Nevertheless, I think you are mistaken to call it enlightenment.
The base of what you are describing as ‘Looking’ is that there is a different way of perceiving the world. Something like a separate perceptual channel or mode. This concept and its various distortions can be indeed found in all the mystical traditions as well as in all kinds of gurus, cults and New Age formulations.
If you study primary material more in depth you will find a good description of the phase you are (to my estimation) in. You got a glimpse of something existing and you try to teach it. This is analogous to understanding that something called number 1 exists, ignore the rest of mathematics and try to convince others of the existence of the number 1. This is very common when people have what can be called a ‘mystical’ or ‘religious’ experience through drugs or application of certain exercises without prescription. What is called in some systems the ‘commanding’ or ‘lower’ self consumes the experience as a status/ego inflating mechanism. Jung encapsulates this issue in his warning to “beware of unearned wisdom”.
My suggestion would be to study the works of Idries Shah. Not skim, study. Start from the more psychological books like Knowing How to Know and Learning How to Learn. Most people will not read his writings because they refuse (for good rational reasons) to entertain the hypothesis of extrasensory perception. But since you are accepting the hypothesis, I guarantee you that you won’t find a more lucid exposition of what the mystics refer to as ‘the science of man’. Just a warning though. You will have to let go of the conviction that you have already achieved something, together with its associated positive feelings. That is the minimum sacrifice you have to make..
Let me know what you think of all that :)
P.S: Concerning your attempts to communicate your experience you might be interested in my description of the problem in my post Too Much Effort | Too Little Evidence
These are great points. I think the strategy is particularly useful against one sided arguments. In the case of my example it was someone suggesting that high IQ is the sole measure of value and I can thus use the strategy with confidence to point to the existence of other parameters.
But you are making another point that I am very interested in and have touched upon in the past:
For those of us who are heliocentrists and atheists, does this mean that there’s something wrong with rationality, since it would have led to wrong answers in those cases? No, it means that there was something wrong with the information available in those historical situations.
Since rationality is dependant on available information it can be said there was something wrong with that ‘rational assesment’ though not with rationality itself. But we should then attend to the fact that our information is still incomplete (to say the least). I touched on a related point in my post Too Much Effort | Too Little Evidence.
I have been attempting to compose a more formal exploration of this issue for some time, but it is quite difficult to formulate properly (and also a bit intimidating to present it, from all places, to the rationalist community, haha).
Yes, I think your example has a related structure. I think people freaked out cause in my example I applied the logic to the complex subject of the ‘meaning of life’ without clarifying my terms :)
You are using interesting symbols that also happen to be the same symbols used by humanity in mythological structures as found in cultures all around the world. There are some great points but I would like to bring up the possibility that you are exhibiting some biases stemming from your current perception of the world. In your words:
Imagine that your river of Babble at its source, the subconscious: a foaming, ugly-colored river littered with half-formed concepts, too wild to navigate, too dirty to drink from. A quarter mile across, the bellow of the rapids is deafening.
Downstream, you build a series of gates to tame the rushing rapids and perhaps extract something beautiful and pure.
The image of water or ‘the deep’ is universally used in mythology and one of its traditional meanings is the ‘unknown’ which of course coincides here with the subconscious. Notice that you are painting a picture of it being ugly-colored, littered, half-formed etc. A more useful approach would be to see it, for example, as deeper, less differentiated, ancient and thus shaped by evolutionary time, hiding treasures within dangers etc.
In the same manner you can start understanding in more depth the emerging symbol of the stream. As a rationalist you tend to idealise this part of the metaphor but you need to balance your assessment. Of course it can be seen as a kind of purification but it can also be seen as something that dries out if not kept in connection to the sea or of course littered. There are so many symbolic threads that have been explored deeply in organically evolved mythological structures.
I am barely scratching the surface here but I hope you will find this comment useful.
If the people that are discussing do not follow the convention of returning to the comment thread with a summary, or in order to continue the discussion, we will end up with comment threads ending abruptly. On the other hand, this could be seen as addresed by your “if you are not willing to do this work etc.” comment.
Could be funny though. Maybe, in these cases, the system can add an automated comment stating that “unfortunately the two parties never returned from their private chat...” :P
Maybe depending on a threshold number of back and forth comments between two users a check can be made to detect if they are currently logged in. If they are then a chat option can appear next to the reply that directs to a chat window like the one you are using for feedback. Alternatively, the check could even happen automatically when the preson attempts yet another reply, informing them of the etiquette to follow. That is if we get convinced that it is a worthwhile methodology.
I have no idea if this would be succesful in practice but it is such a novel idea that it might be worth a test during the beta. Not sure about the implementation complexity though...
This is such a great suggestion. I have even noticed this dynamic in verbal conversations where I will have a perfectly civil and productive conversation with a person until we are part of a larger group. Another interesting thing is that the reverse can happen. A person that disagrees with me in private will support the same point when I defend it to another person in a group setting! Such a clear indication that the person’s goal was not learning but getting high on the emotion of winning!
Meta: It is not possible to ‘move to private’ in LW is it?
Thanks for adding clear outlines and alternate colors to the comments. This is so much better! A couple of other things that need to change in my opinion:
When composing a comment the background is the same color as the parent text making it difficult to know where the post we are replying to ends and our comment starts. Once it is posted it is all good.
When clicking on a notification the comment it displayed at the top of the page which is very convenient but its background color is the same as the rest of the page. This makes it look wrong as it conflicts with the title being before the main text. The right approach would be to make it clear that this is a type of alert by, for example, changing the background color.
I don’t know if it is just me but I do not get spell checking when composing a post or comment.
Thanks for all the great work!
You seem to be misunderstanding the argument structure. It is not an analogy. I am using an equivalent example from the past.
No worries at all! Also thanks for the additional comments. I think the approach of using core LW content as a starting point, though not always possible, is a great suggestion.
Interesting but I don’t see at all how this is solving the grounding problem.
The use of variables themselves as a basic unit is a give away that the bridging of the gap is assumed. For example, a human starts understanding the concept of a cup by using it way before it has a word for it. The border between the embodied knowledge and the abstract syntactic one is when a word is attached to the ‘meaning’ of the cup that is already there. As Henri Bergson puts it, you can try to find the meaning of the poem in the words and the letters, but you will fail. You are examining the symbol and not the meaning. The symbol/variable can also be observed to be arbitrary. I can say ‘Give me this cup’ or ‘Give me this broindogoing’ as long as we have agreed what ‘broindogoing’ means. If we haven’t and there is no already defined variable in use in your mind I would have to find a way to direct you to an experience of what a cup is.
You might say. There are variables in the human mind that are under words. I would say there are ‘representations’ but they don’t seem to be of an abstract syntactic kind. There seems to be something like a low resolution analogy or metaphor in the technical sense of the words. If you think I am just speculating I would claim that there is plenty of evidence surfacing that the ‘intellect’ which is the system that you are attempting to generalise as the whole of the human mind is grafted on top, and is dependant on, an underlying system of a different, not yet understood, architecture. I recommend, as an introduction to the alternative view to your own, the book ‘The Master and His Emissary’ by Iain McGilChrist for the biological, medical and to a certain extend philosophical evidence.