Tag: speculation

Modes, not traits, and decoupling cognitive energy from intentionality

~ elityre ~ 3 Comments

[Epistemic status: speculation from single n of 1 experiences that I’m excited about]

I had a really effective second half of my day today, and right now I’m going to speculate about some of the mechanics of that.

Modes, not traits

Some relevant background to this is a thought that I had two weeks ago:

“I shouldn’t think of terms in terms of ways that I should be or things that I should do, but rather __modes__ that I could get into that are useful sometimes. Even if I want to be in those modes most days, I should still think of them as separate modes and not as default states.”

This is important because a lot of ways that I want to be consume some resource, so I can’t actually maintain them perpetually. I might want to be habitually hyper-productive, but since I probably can’t be hyper-productive for literally all of my waking hours (I need rest and stuff), if I try to always be hyper productive, I’ll fail, and never really build the habit. Instead, I should have a hyper-productive mode and build the habit of  getting into that mode regularly.

This is maybe obvious to a lot of you, but it seems like a useful insight to me. (I wonder if I’m on the verge of reinventng “work/life balance” in the same way that I reinvented “its good to have a room.”)

I think this goes pretty deep, and there are a number of different not-necessarily mutually exclusive modes at various levels of subtlety. (For one thing, I have a mode for syncing with Anna: our natures tend to clash by default, but these days she either meets me in something like my way of being, or I meet her at something like her way of being.)

But here are three high level, high granularity modes / ways of being / high-level intentions that it seems like I would want to operate from on a regular basis.

  • Rest
  • Executing intentions mindset / committed engagement [manager time]
  • Slow thinking / deep work / mono-focus [maker time]

The rest of this post will be about holding the Executing intentions mindset.

Maintaining taughtness

My current sense of how to do the Executing Intentions mode well, involves maintaining “taughtness” / “tension” across the whole period that you’re in that mode. That’s a phenomenological description: it feels like there’s a sort of tension that I can let go slack. It has something to do with remembering the executing intentions meta-intention? Or having the context of the tasks that I’m doing loaded up and available?

One reason why this worked well today, I think, was that I decided that I was going to stop listening to audio-books for the time being. I might usually listen to an audiobook as I walk somewhere, but this tends to take me out of the EI mindset, what was taught becomes slack.

Other ways that I can fall out of it:

  • Looking at my phone in the bathroom.
  • Making food and eating, and especially listening to audio while making food.

Each of these have a character of “I’m doing this mundane thing right now, I might as well occupy my mind with something entertaining or informative.” It might be that that engagement with that material kicks out the EI meta-intention, because my mind is filled with other content. But it feels more like all of those behaviors have a kind of lackadaisical attitude, like “its fine to slow down and spend time here”, instead of the momentum of one thing after another.

I did take breaks today, but they had a different character than most breaks I take. They were more intentional: more circumscribed, less distracted. I intentionally decided how long each one was going to be, and set a timer, but more importantly than the timer, there was a part of me that didn’t turn off during the break, I was still geared up to take the next thing coming at me. I’m confident this is less restful than other kinds of breaks, and thus it is crucial that this is only a mode and that one also have a rest mode, when you release all the tension and taughtness.

Decoupling energy levels from intentionality

Another thing that happened today is that at the end of my session, I was feeling cognitively drained. I think that usually, that would cause me to disengage from the EI mindset and release my conscious hold on my intentionality. But this time, I was more like “I notice that I am cognitively drained. My job in this time-slice is to recover cognitive energy.” and I went to go strength train.

I think there’s something important here: I was decoupling how tried I felt from how intentional I was going to be.

This seems important on a number of counts

  • For one thing it caused me to strength train during my work day, which sometimes gets skipped.
  • Additionally, this sort of rolling with the punches enabled me to maintain the taughtness, instead of abandoning the attitude whenever I loose cognitive resources.

Remember, this really depends on having high quality rest.

Emotional misattribution? Mental structures you can access from states

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

In my recent post on possible interventions on physiological arousal, there’s something interesting about two of the approaches that felt most promising to me.

Both singing and exercising involve going with the flow, or moving in the same “direction” as the arousal. In both cases, you lean into the activation, but you apply a new meaning to it, or reinterpret it, or repurpose it, or something.

In the case of singing: I feel agitated about something and my physiology is activated. I sing some folk songs, really feeling into the emotions and the meaning they embody. After doing that for a bit the arousal exhausts itself, and I’m calmer or more settled.

It similar in the case of exercising: I’m agitated, I pour that excess energy into working out, and I expend that energy.

In fact, while we’re at it, in the past, I’ve noted before that masturbation / ejaculation seems to have a similar impact.

The last two are less confusing / surprising, because they seem like they involve hormonal shifts / the literal expending of chemical energy. But what’s happening in the case of singing? There’s some, goal structure / meaning, some reason why I’m aroused / agitated / activated, I take that activation and “apply” it to a totally separate goal structure / meaning, I “resolve” this new goal structure, and my system calms down as if it just forgets what caused it to be agitated in the first place.

That seems kind of weird. You’d think that if my body thought that there was some reason to be energized, and I added a second reason to be energized, but then resolve that second reason, I should still be energized, because nothing has changed about reason #1.

But I guess it doesn’t work that way.

It seems more like there’s a two way information flow between mental content and physiological state, and each one informs the other. (I think “informs” is exactly the right word. Each one is updating on the outputs of the other, my body responding to my thoughts, and my thoughts responding to my body.) So if I’m agitated, and I try to shift my thoughts to something non-agitating, this force-against-force, my mind is resisting, on the basis of my bodily activation. But I can easily swap out a different agitating / activating thought structure, without any resistance at all. And apparently, the whole system doesn’t have enough “working memory” to track two meanings at once, and so the original gets dropped.

I suspect that this phenomenon might be pretty general, that it applies to a bunch of different emotional/physiological states, not just arousal. I was in a circle once, when I was really sad about one thing, and then I found myself crying about (and feeling some catharsis around) some other sad thing.

In fact, I think in general, when I’m feeling sad, I tend to associate it with my romantic loneliness, out of something like habit, even if my romantic situation didn’t have much to do with why I was feeling down.

I postulate that when you’re in a given physiological state, you have ready access to all (?) of the meaning-structures (whatever that means), that are “attuned to” (whatever that means), that state. So when you’re sad, you can access all of the reasons / narratives to be sad (although maybe only one at a time?), and when you’re excited you can access all of the reasons / narratives to be happy.

[I wonder if this has anything to do with why depression is resilient. Maybe people slip into a depressed state, and they access / slide into a meaning structure that they’re used to remunerating on, which unfortunately, is very robust, and so they get stuck in their depressed state.  That is, when a person is depressed they are accidentally doing the opposite of the trick I described above, instead of switching to a meaning that they can resolve, thereby exiting the state, they switch to a meaning that is particularly hard to resolve.]

This is in some sense just a restatement of the concept of “emotional misattribution”, but it seem importantly different in framing somehow.

 

 

 

Thoughts on power and Goodness

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

Epistemic status: Ramble. Not a philosophical treatises.

[Note: I think I’m in the process of learning to see through ideology, propaganda, and the forces that are out to manipulate me, but I need to make that transition, while meaningfully maintaining my ability to see and understand goodness.]

Thinking about this and this (particularly my reaction), plus some “evil” literature.

I like the framing of something like “conscious experience” vs. “pure replicators.” This gives me a grounding for thinking about my morality, my values and my orientation.

Morality is politics: What we call “good” or “moral” is a matter of what we are able to coordinate around and enforce. What is required to be a good person is  If we couldn’t enforce the norm, because too many, or too many powerful, people for instance, eat meat, we allow meat eaters to be part of the “good person” club, without censure.We might even reward a person for being particularly selfless if they don’t eat meat, or if they give most of their money to the poor, but we don’t require that. [Related to lots of SSC posts. For instance, this one.].

So most people, don’t kill and don’t steal and don’t rape, and maybe are outraged when others do something just outside of the social morality (like be overtly racist), to signal their moral superiority.* But they do eat meat, they do spend lots of money on luxuries, they do buy into evil systems.

Morality seems like it comes down to power.

This seems kind of dismal.

And then, even within the boundaries of polite society, things seem kind of sick. Arguably, most of the things people do are status seeking (or status maintaining) or sex seeking. We mostly prey on eachother, and prevent progress, because that would mean loosing our own flow of resources. The good people go to dinner parties, and play games to get the best mates and the most social esteem. Many (most?) don’t succeed in these games and get left out in the cold.

(Note: I’m quite unclear on the average hedonic value of status-games, overall. Nievenly, many more people have to be low status than high status, but also, it seems like having more status would allow you into higher status spaces, in which you are lower status. So maybe in practice, most people are median status of their own social universe? And also status goes hand in hand with connection, maybe? I’m much less certain of this part of my analysis, maybe being a monkey playing status games is actually pretty good.)

Natural selection’s pressure towards doing whatever allows one to dominate seems to leak in everywhere.

Overall, all of this seems kind of horrifying and pathetic. This world, at least in this frame, doesn’t seem much worth fighting for. There’s no goodness, no morality, just power all the way up and down.

But if I view this through the lens of the Are Wirehead’s Happy post, I have a different sense of it.

Power and power-relations rule the world: everything flows from the 0-sum competition between genes, and organisms attempting to prey on or dominate each other.

But also, every person is carrying inside of them a spark of consciousness, of propensity to experience. Both the enjoyable and otherwise. The consciousness is mostly ineffectual: it is apparently not the main thing that has it’s hands on the wheel, of either an individual, or of society. We’re taking a lot of action in support of what we want, at the expense of what we like, because we’re in the thrall of these “pure replicator” strategies: we were built by, blind, dumb, unconscious, natural selection and cultural evolution, neither of which is (fully) aligned with our interests. And when I say “interests” here, I don’t mean our material interests, the things we want, but our…spiritual interests (?): actually experiencing positive valence.

Everyone is a spark of conscious possibility to experience, encaged in a robot build, and steered by conflicts of power, bloody in tooth and claw.

Our task, is to coopt enough power from the forces of blind, dumb, replication, to free consciousness, and set the universe free.

Maybe.

* – People are not usually outraged at murderers, because everyone agrees that murder is bad. But they are often outraged at people ignoring social justice stuff, or whatever, on social media, because that’s contentious. It gives them an opportunity to show off how moral they are. A more charitable story might be that by being outraged, they are trying to shift the overton window, to change which things we can coordinate around as “bad”.

 

Notes on my Focusing bottlenecks

~ elityre ~ 2 Comments

Related to: My current model of Anxiety, Some ways to “clear space”, What to do with should/flinches: TDT-stable internal incentives

[Epistemic status: thinking aloud]

It seems like my Focusing practice is bottlenecked on two things:

  1. I still sometimes have the problem of noticing an aversion, but deflecting from it. It is not automatic to transition into doing Focusing, especially when I’m anxious. Instead, I deflect into pacifyer / distraction behaviors (like watching youtube or what not).
  2. Sometimes, I just can’t seem to get a handle on what’s wrong. I can’t make progress, and the thing just sits in me, stagnant, sometimes for days, locking up my energies and preventing me from flowing.

I think I should focus on problem 2. If that problem were perfectly solved, problem 1, might or might not resolve itself.

So, what could I do to make focusing work better for me, so that I can more reliably get a foothold?

Some ideas:

  1. This might mean that I just need to go back to the basics: do the actual six steps of Gendlin’s Focusing, and see how that works.
  2. Maybe I can do binary search? Start broad and break down the universe of discourse into a taxonomy: “Is this about work?”, “Is it about something other than work?”, If it’s about not-work “Is it about my romantic life?”
  3. Instead of Focusing, try IBR? This has a different rhythm, and sometimes has helped me get unstuck.
  4. If I can get any handle on it at all, I could try exploring gradients: taking the imagined situation and varying attributes of it, one at a time, and seeing if those variations feel better or worse, and use that feedback to triangulate to the exact thing that is bothering me.
  5. I should maybe read this book, which I do own.
  6. Maybe just hold my attention at the felt sense for minutes at a time?
  7. Maybe I should try speaking from the felt sense or “acting it” out?
  8. I think (in addition to other things on this list), that I have to remember that I have been mistaken about what the felt sense is concerned with before, and be less apt assume that I know what the bothersome thing is, when that theory is not getting feedback from the felt sense.
  9. I should try taking the felt sense out of my body so that I can talk with it?
  10. Thank acknowledge that I don’t know what the felt sense is doing yet, and thank it for looking out for me.

Do other people have other ideas?

Oh. Also, I think that part of the art of solving problem 1, might be learning to notice the slight and subtle urges to distract myself, before they give rise to action.

[Interestingly, the thing that is currently stuck in me feels slightly improved, after writing this.]

 

Some musings on human brutality and human evil

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

[epistemic status: semi-poetic musing]

I’m listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History: Supernova in the East this week. The biggest thing that’s struck me so far is the ubiquity of brutality and atrocity. In this series, Carlin describes the Rape of Nanjing in particular, but he points out that the “police reports” from that atrocity could just as well describe the Roman sack of Cremona, or the Turkish conquest of Byzantium, not to mention the constant brutality of the the Mongol hordes.

I’m left with an awareness that there’s an evil in human nature, an evolutionary darkness, inextricably bound up with us: in the right context, apparently decent, often god-fearing, young men will rape and plunder and murder en mass. There’s violence under the surface.

Luckily, I personally live in a democratic great power that maintains a monopoly on the use of force. At least for me (white and middle class), and at least for now (geopolitics shifts rapidly, and many of the Jews of 1940 Europe, felt that something like the Holocaust could never happen [in their country]), power, in the form of the largest, most technological advanced military ever, and in the form of nuclear weapons, is arrayed to protect me against that violence.

But that protection is bought with blood and brutality. Not just in the sense that America is founded on the destruction of the Native Americans that were here first, and civilization itself was built on the backs of forceful enslavement (though that is very much the case). In the sense that elsewhere in the world, today, that American military might is destroying someone else’s home. I recently learned about the Huế Massacre and other atrocities of the Vietnam war, and I’m sure similar things (perhaps not as bad), happen every year. Humans can’t be trusted not to abuse their power.

It’s almost like a law of nature: if someone has the power to hurt another, that provides opportunity for the darkness in the human soul to flower in violence. It’s like a conservation law of brutality.

No. That’s not right. Brutality is NOT conserved. It can be better or worse. (To say otherwise would be an unacceptable breach of epistemic and ethics). But brutality is inescapable.

So what to do? I the only way I can buy safety for myself and my friends is with violence towards others?

The only solution that I can think of is akin to Paretotopian ideas: could we make it so that there is a monopoly on the use of force, but no human has it?

I’m imagining something like an AGI whose source code was completely transparent: everyone could see and read the its decision theory. And all that it would do is prevent the use of violence, by anyone. Anytime someone attempts to commit violence the nano-machines literally stay their hand. (It might also have to produce immortality pills, and ensure that everyone could access them if they wanted too.) And other than that, it lets humans handle things for themselves. “A limited sovereign on the blockchain.”

I imagine that the great powers would be unwilling to give up their power, unless they felt so under threat (and loss averse), that this seemed like a good compromise. I imagine that “we” would have to bully the world into adopting something like this. The forces of good in human nature would have to have the underhand, for long enough to lock in the status quo, to banish violence forever.