My position is that if you’re only listening to somatic echoes of emotions you’re still not really listening particularly well yet, or, if the somatic echoes are richer and more informative to you than the flashes and dialogues of tacit meaning or intent that you can get from probing them in the mind then you may still have a lot of barriers in your mind.
Is there a specific example of the difference between just somatic sensing and having it being intuitively reflected through your thoughts? I feel like you’re saying something important but I’m not fully sure how it manifests more concretely and I might want to work on this skill.
I do feel like there’s something to be said for a more integrated emotion system not being as somatic but being more implicit in the system, like your thoughts and feelings are more one-pointed which is kind of where my experience has shifted to over time, I don’t know if this is what you mean?
I don’t think I’ve experienced only having somatic attribution, I got interested in introspection really young and I remember it being more prominent then, but of course I wasn’t doing it particularly well. I never got interested in it in the same way as lots of you are getting interested now (might later, dunno), so I can’t say much about those practices or how they compare to mine with confidence. My current vague impression is that somatic attribution maximalists seem to be a lot less consciously involved in the integration/self-alignment process than I am. It seems like they’re less occupied with the meaning of art and so on, but causality could run in both directions there (impulse to seek meaning leads to getting good at that leads to using it in introspection). For them integration seems to be more of a process of submission than of active dialog or induction/articulation. They don’t reason with their parts, their bulk has less trust in their reason. It ends up valuing it less. Where my process would stop and say to consciousness “hey there seems to be a contradiction here, resolve it, find out who’s wrong, or find a synthesis, that’s your job”, theirs will either try to live with the contradiction or avoid it in life without really caring why.
It’s hard to tell whether I’m more or less integrated on the whole, or to what extent my practice is causative of that (in either direction), due to other life factors.
The approach that I’d advocate, which I’ve never seen anyone advocate, and thus haven’t been able to practice seriously myself for a lack of support, is for the conceived sense of self to extent beyond the bodymap and to be deliberately shaped to maximise meaningful self-communication. For instance, instead of just feeling social threat in your back, also feel it in your social network, that too just as much is part of you, feel the way it wears down the connections and the way it responds to that.
I’ve seen advocacy for identifying with nothing (purity, relentless criticism and criticism of criticism, tends to end in a place of weakness and stagnation), and for for universal identification (which I’m increasingly sympathetic to and I think is in some sense just correct, but which I think in naive form has obvious issues with bad habit formation or memetic parasites), but I have not seen advocacy for controlled/discerning identification. Except maybe in the IFS scene. But I get the sense they’re not using all of their degrees of freedom. (I think parallel subagents aren’t really a thing in humans so it ends up not being an accurate self-concept.)
Okay, this is quite interesting. I’ll try to parse this by mentioning a potential instantiation of this and maybe you could let me know if I got it wrong or right/somewhere in between?
The scenario is that I’m trying to figure out what I should do when I wake up in the morning and I’m on a walk. What do I is that I then listen to the world in some way, I try to figure out some good way to take actions. One way to do this is somato sensory experiencing, I listen into my sub-parts. Yet a problem with this is that there’s a egree o fpassivity here. Yes my stomach is saying go away and hide and my shoulders are saying that I’m carrying weight whilst maybe my face is smiling and is curious. This listening has some sort of lack of integration within it? I now know this but that doesn’t mean that my sub-parts have had a good conversation.
We can extend this even further for why is the best basis something like emotions? Why can’t we sense things like a degree of extended cognition within our social circles and with different things that we do?
The practice is then somehow figure out how to listen and do good bargaining and to come up with good solutions for the combined agency that you have, whatever that might be? And the more extended and open you can make that cognition, the better it is?
Yet, you shouldn’t fully identify with your social network or the world, neither should you identify with nothing, you should identify with something in between (non-duality from buddhism?). You should try to find the most (causally?) relevant actor to identify with and this is situation dependent and an art?
So that is the process to engage in and the answer is different for each person? (Let me know if I’m off the mark or if this is kind of what you mean)
I’m not sure, are there any practices nonduality doesn’t touch? I haven’t thought about it. For me nonduality seems to coimply embedded agency or the need to budget one’s cognition in any way, which I guess would be related with extended cognition (the reliance on other peoples’ cognitive products), well, I guess it depends what we mean by dualism. Dualism as far as I ever had it was, conceiving the mind as an idealised decision theory agent, a type of thing which wouldn’t work at all without infinite compute, though I never believed literally that, so idk. Oh no. Is believing in pi in FDT (the policy metaphysically shared by all FDT agents) dualistic. Well. If so maybe there’s a kind of dualism I’d stand for! :<. And the dualism of spiritualists often seems to presume some form of hypercomputation.
Generally I couldn’t say I disagree with any of that. So maybe yes.
the more extended and open you can make that cognition, the better it is?
I didn’t mean to make it about that specifically. But maybe you’re onto something, maybe it really is about that. We should be doing more extended cognition than we used to, given the existence of the internet. I get the sense that my type tends to care more about discourse health, perhaps because we identify more with broader discursive systems, we enjoy believing things that we read online, so we are bothered when the online has production issues.
My position is that if you’re only listening to somatic echoes of emotions you’re still not really listening particularly well yet, or, if the somatic echoes are richer and more informative to you than the flashes and dialogues of tacit meaning or intent that you can get from probing them in the mind then you may still have a lot of barriers in your mind.
Could you elaborate here?
Is there a specific example of the difference between just somatic sensing and having it being intuitively reflected through your thoughts? I feel like you’re saying something important but I’m not fully sure how it manifests more concretely and I might want to work on this skill.
I do feel like there’s something to be said for a more integrated emotion system not being as somatic but being more implicit in the system, like your thoughts and feelings are more one-pointed which is kind of where my experience has shifted to over time, I don’t know if this is what you mean?
I don’t think I’ve experienced only having somatic attribution, I got interested in introspection really young and I remember it being more prominent then, but of course I wasn’t doing it particularly well. I never got interested in it in the same way as lots of you are getting interested now (might later, dunno), so I can’t say much about those practices or how they compare to mine with confidence. My current vague impression is that somatic attribution maximalists seem to be a lot less consciously involved in the integration/self-alignment process than I am. It seems like they’re less occupied with the meaning of art and so on, but causality could run in both directions there (impulse to seek meaning leads to getting good at that leads to using it in introspection). For them integration seems to be more of a process of submission than of active dialog or induction/articulation. They don’t reason with their parts, their bulk has less trust in their reason. It ends up valuing it less. Where my process would stop and say to consciousness “hey there seems to be a contradiction here, resolve it, find out who’s wrong, or find a synthesis, that’s your job”, theirs will either try to live with the contradiction or avoid it in life without really caring why.
It’s hard to tell whether I’m more or less integrated on the whole, or to what extent my practice is causative of that (in either direction), due to other life factors.
The approach that I’d advocate, which I’ve never seen anyone advocate, and thus haven’t been able to practice seriously myself for a lack of support, is for the conceived sense of self to extent beyond the bodymap and to be deliberately shaped to maximise meaningful self-communication. For instance, instead of just feeling social threat in your back, also feel it in your social network, that too just as much is part of you, feel the way it wears down the connections and the way it responds to that.
I’ve seen advocacy for identifying with nothing (purity, relentless criticism and criticism of criticism, tends to end in a place of weakness and stagnation), and for for universal identification (which I’m increasingly sympathetic to and I think is in some sense just correct, but which I think in naive form has obvious issues with bad habit formation or memetic parasites), but I have not seen advocacy for controlled/discerning identification. Except maybe in the IFS scene. But I get the sense they’re not using all of their degrees of freedom. (I think parallel subagents aren’t really a thing in humans so it ends up not being an accurate self-concept.)
Okay, this is quite interesting. I’ll try to parse this by mentioning a potential instantiation of this and maybe you could let me know if I got it wrong or right/somewhere in between?
The scenario is that I’m trying to figure out what I should do when I wake up in the morning and I’m on a walk. What do I is that I then listen to the world in some way, I try to figure out some good way to take actions. One way to do this is somato sensory experiencing, I listen into my sub-parts. Yet a problem with this is that there’s a egree o fpassivity here. Yes my stomach is saying go away and hide and my shoulders are saying that I’m carrying weight whilst maybe my face is smiling and is curious. This listening has some sort of lack of integration within it? I now know this but that doesn’t mean that my sub-parts have had a good conversation.
We can extend this even further for why is the best basis something like emotions? Why can’t we sense things like a degree of extended cognition within our social circles and with different things that we do?
The practice is then somehow figure out how to listen and do good bargaining and to come up with good solutions for the combined agency that you have, whatever that might be? And the more extended and open you can make that cognition, the better it is?
Yet, you shouldn’t fully identify with your social network or the world, neither should you identify with nothing, you should identify with something in between (non-duality from buddhism?). You should try to find the most (causally?) relevant actor to identify with and this is situation dependent and an art?
So that is the process to engage in and the answer is different for each person? (Let me know if I’m off the mark or if this is kind of what you mean)
I’m not sure, are there any practices nonduality doesn’t touch? I haven’t thought about it. For me nonduality seems to coimply embedded agency or the need to budget one’s cognition in any way, which I guess would be related with extended cognition (the reliance on other peoples’ cognitive products), well, I guess it depends what we mean by dualism. Dualism as far as I ever had it was, conceiving the mind as an idealised decision theory agent, a type of thing which wouldn’t work at all without infinite compute, though I never believed literally that, so idk. Oh no. Is believing in pi in FDT (the policy metaphysically shared by all FDT agents) dualistic. Well. If so maybe there’s a kind of dualism I’d stand for! :<. And the dualism of spiritualists often seems to presume some form of hypercomputation.
Generally I couldn’t say I disagree with any of that. So maybe yes.
I didn’t mean to make it about that specifically. But maybe you’re onto something, maybe it really is about that. We should be doing more extended cognition than we used to, given the existence of the internet. I get the sense that my type tends to care more about discourse health, perhaps because we identify more with broader discursive systems, we enjoy believing things that we read online, so we are bothered when the online has production issues.