You’re replying to Linda’s comment, which was mainly referring to a paragraph that I deleted shortly after posting this a year ago. The current relevant text (as in my other comment) is:
As above, the homunculus is definitionally the thing that carries “vitalistic force”, and that does the “wanting”, and that does any acts that we describe as “acts of free will”. Beyond that, I don’t have strong opinions. Is the homunculus the same as the whole “self”, or is the homunculus only one part of a broader “self”? No opinion. Different people probably conceptualize themselves rather differently anyway.
To me, this seems like something everyone should be able relate to, apart from the PNSE thing in Post 6. For example, if your intuitions include the idea of willpower, then I think your intuitions have to also include some, umm, noun, that is exercising that willpower.
But you find it weird and unrelatable? Or was it a different part of the post that left you feeling puzzled when you read it? (If so, maybe I can reword that part.) Thanks.
Ty! Yeah, I think I’m trying to figure out whether I have such a noun and if so if it’s the same as the self, so the question you don’t want to weigh in on.
I observe processes in me that take the shape of:
Hypotheticals bubble up and play out in a few different ways:
I’d conventionally describe this as “I’m considering alternatives,” but really the ideas come from somewhere uncontrollably.
Something evaluates the desirability of these alternatives in a chill, nonjudgmental fashion and ranks them according to how in line with my values and goals they are.
There is also this part that has become much more chill over the past year that threatens to self-shame and self-punish me if I end up executing on one further down the list.
I execute one the top option, which I would conventionally describe as “I decide what to do,” but I’m not sure if there’s a decision involved. If I make a spreadsheet and discuss it with people and then execute the top option, it feels like a decision process, but if it’s a decision whether to ask someone one question or another question, the outcomes seems to flow from the ranking without the intervention of a noun.
Actions just happen because they were not tagged as being potentially controversial:
I observe myself picking up roasted peanuts, which feels ego-syntonic, or
I observe myself making an annoyed sound, which I regret, which feels ego-dystonic and was previously followed by self-shaming.
Insofar as these evaluations, the chill one and the threatening one, have to do with me, this body/algorithm/identity, I’ve been referring to them as my self. I think that is already a more narrow definition than the one that is widely used that I should switch to once I get a fuller picture of everything else that is also self.
When I look for the homunculus, I look at the moment between ranking and execution. But in most everyday situations, there’s nothing there.
Willpower also doesn’t map clearly to anything. If I want to finish part of a software project some evening despite being tired because someone else depends on me, I have this part that tells me that I should finish it because someone depends on me, which becomes part of the ranking procedure. Previously the threat that I’d self-punish if I don’t deliver was also part of the ranking procedure.
It’s hard to tell for me whether my implicit model of a door knob is that it’s hard to turn rather than that I have trouble turning it. Maybe? When it comes to taste, “X tastes bad” always (or as far as I can remember) seemed like a linguistic shortcut to me rather than a meaningful statement about the external world. Accepting moral antirealism, i.e. also seeing “X is morally bad” as a linguistic shortcut, is something that I only became convinced of 10 years ago when a friend of mine got me to consider it seriously for the first time.
If someone were to tell me, “You owe me!” and it’s plausible, I think that would cause some kind of stir in me that a statement like, “You’re toxic!” doesn’t cause anymore. The first seems to still connect to something that is clearly not viridical but that I’m still reifying whereas I don’t seem to believe in the second anymore.
So idk, I seem to be in some kind of messy state where it’s super hard for me to find this homunculus, and where I and my self are fairly distinct to me but not fully, still blur into each other in some contexts.
Now I don’t doubt that other people have a clear homunculus like that. I’m often puzzled by the reluctance some people display to accept that we might be in a simulation or that copies of them would feel the same as they do or that AIs can be conscious in the same sense they are. So I am a bit weird (though not by LW standards), but figuring out exactly in what ways my perception is different from the conventional one eludes me.
Oh, until 2013 I had a process that narrated all my decisions. The ranking and execution happened as always, but there was this separate process that observed the ranking and execution and, by trial and error, tried to construct narratives of why the execution was the one that it was. There usually made some sense, but in extreme situations they were also often clearly self-deceptive. I stopped doing that in late August 2013. Maybe that was a kind of homunculus illusion?
I’m almost done reading your sequence, and I looove it! Lots of awesome insights! Especially the application to BPD (and by extension other PDs) is very interesting to me!
You’re replying to Linda’s comment, which was mainly referring to a paragraph that I deleted shortly after posting this a year ago. The current relevant text (as in my other comment) is:
To me, this seems like something everyone should be able relate to, apart from the PNSE thing in Post 6. For example, if your intuitions include the idea of willpower, then I think your intuitions have to also include some, umm, noun, that is exercising that willpower.
But you find it weird and unrelatable? Or was it a different part of the post that left you feeling puzzled when you read it? (If so, maybe I can reword that part.) Thanks.
Ty! Yeah, I think I’m trying to figure out whether I have such a noun and if so if it’s the same as the self, so the question you don’t want to weigh in on.
I observe processes in me that take the shape of:
Hypotheticals bubble up and play out in a few different ways:
I’d conventionally describe this as “I’m considering alternatives,” but really the ideas come from somewhere uncontrollably.
Something evaluates the desirability of these alternatives in a chill, nonjudgmental fashion and ranks them according to how in line with my values and goals they are.
There is also this part that has become much more chill over the past year that threatens to self-shame and self-punish me if I end up executing on one further down the list.
I execute one the top option, which I would conventionally describe as “I decide what to do,” but I’m not sure if there’s a decision involved. If I make a spreadsheet and discuss it with people and then execute the top option, it feels like a decision process, but if it’s a decision whether to ask someone one question or another question, the outcomes seems to flow from the ranking without the intervention of a noun.
Actions just happen because they were not tagged as being potentially controversial:
I observe myself picking up roasted peanuts, which feels ego-syntonic, or
I observe myself making an annoyed sound, which I regret, which feels ego-dystonic and was previously followed by self-shaming.
Insofar as these evaluations, the chill one and the threatening one, have to do with me, this body/algorithm/identity, I’ve been referring to them as my self. I think that is already a more narrow definition than the one that is widely used that I should switch to once I get a fuller picture of everything else that is also self.
When I look for the homunculus, I look at the moment between ranking and execution. But in most everyday situations, there’s nothing there.
Willpower also doesn’t map clearly to anything. If I want to finish part of a software project some evening despite being tired because someone else depends on me, I have this part that tells me that I should finish it because someone depends on me, which becomes part of the ranking procedure. Previously the threat that I’d self-punish if I don’t deliver was also part of the ranking procedure.
It’s hard to tell for me whether my implicit model of a door knob is that it’s hard to turn rather than that I have trouble turning it. Maybe? When it comes to taste, “X tastes bad” always (or as far as I can remember) seemed like a linguistic shortcut to me rather than a meaningful statement about the external world. Accepting moral antirealism, i.e. also seeing “X is morally bad” as a linguistic shortcut, is something that I only became convinced of 10 years ago when a friend of mine got me to consider it seriously for the first time.
If someone were to tell me, “You owe me!” and it’s plausible, I think that would cause some kind of stir in me that a statement like, “You’re toxic!” doesn’t cause anymore. The first seems to still connect to something that is clearly not viridical but that I’m still reifying whereas I don’t seem to believe in the second anymore.
So idk, I seem to be in some kind of messy state where it’s super hard for me to find this homunculus, and where I and my self are fairly distinct to me but not fully, still blur into each other in some contexts.
Now I don’t doubt that other people have a clear homunculus like that. I’m often puzzled by the reluctance some people display to accept that we might be in a simulation or that copies of them would feel the same as they do or that AIs can be conscious in the same sense they are. So I am a bit weird (though not by LW standards), but figuring out exactly in what ways my perception is different from the conventional one eludes me.
Oh, until 2013 I had a process that narrated all my decisions. The ranking and execution happened as always, but there was this separate process that observed the ranking and execution and, by trial and error, tried to construct narratives of why the execution was the one that it was. There usually made some sense, but in extreme situations they were also often clearly self-deceptive. I stopped doing that in late August 2013. Maybe that was a kind of homunculus illusion?
I’m almost done reading your sequence, and I looove it! Lots of awesome insights! Especially the application to BPD (and by extension other PDs) is very interesting to me!