Thanks for trying to model it a bit more mechanistically. I think you’re right that unfolding leans receptive & bottom-up, while thinking leans active & top-down.
But there’s a bit more in what I’m trying to bake into “unfolding”:
Unfolding requires both bottom-up and top-down work. e.g. I am choosing to look at this specific area of my life right now (top down), but once tuned into it, I drop the narrative and notice what is actually there (bottom up)
The mechanism that distinguishes real unfolding from random mental drift is salience/felt-sense. In addition to “let disconnected patterns surface” there’s also “notice where there’s emotional charge/tightness/aliveness, and investigate THAT specifically.”
The telic dimension of unfolding is an attempt to tie together top-down and bottom-up thinking. Why am I doing what I am doing—not just in this moment, but in my life in general? What is on the frontier? How can I tune into what is worth putting my attention towards?
This aspect of things is incredibly personal. One answer to “what is worth putting my attention towards” is “the highest x-risk cause in the world” (thinking). But that’s not necessarily attending to the contextual/personal aspects of one’s situation (unfolding what this situation means in relation to everything else in your life) .
Maybe this is contained in your point already and I missed it. If not, hopefully this helps add a dimension!
Yeah, I was not intending to exclude this type of goal directedness from unfolding. I don’t actually know the terminology for the thing I’ve been noticing a lot, but I bet the Buddhists have some specialized words which you’ll be able to inform me of. The ones I use are trying Vs intention, or wanting Vs desire. It’s something like steering by rejecting the realities you don’t like, conditioning on the outcomes you want in a way which makes you unable to look at the alternative clearly.
That’s the kind of goal directedness which blocks unfolding, whereas being accepting of the fact that your preferred outcome might not happen and holding your preferences about the world within your self model’s Markov boundary rather than letting them leak into your world model is totally compatible with unfolding.
I wasn’t differentiating from random drift though, just noticing the failure mode most salient to me which is unfolding blocking trying vibes :)
Thanks for trying to model it a bit more mechanistically. I think you’re right that unfolding leans receptive & bottom-up, while thinking leans active & top-down.
But there’s a bit more in what I’m trying to bake into “unfolding”:
Unfolding requires both bottom-up and top-down work. e.g. I am choosing to look at this specific area of my life right now (top down), but once tuned into it, I drop the narrative and notice what is actually there (bottom up)
The mechanism that distinguishes real unfolding from random mental drift is salience/felt-sense. In addition to “let disconnected patterns surface” there’s also “notice where there’s emotional charge/tightness/aliveness, and investigate THAT specifically.”
The telic dimension of unfolding is an attempt to tie together top-down and bottom-up thinking. Why am I doing what I am doing—not just in this moment, but in my life in general? What is on the frontier? How can I tune into what is worth putting my attention towards?
This aspect of things is incredibly personal. One answer to “what is worth putting my attention towards” is “the highest x-risk cause in the world” (thinking). But that’s not necessarily attending to the contextual/personal aspects of one’s situation (unfolding what this situation means in relation to everything else in your life) .
Maybe this is contained in your point already and I missed it. If not, hopefully this helps add a dimension!
Yeah, I was not intending to exclude this type of goal directedness from unfolding. I don’t actually know the terminology for the thing I’ve been noticing a lot, but I bet the Buddhists have some specialized words which you’ll be able to inform me of. The ones I use are trying Vs intention, or wanting Vs desire. It’s something like steering by rejecting the realities you don’t like, conditioning on the outcomes you want in a way which makes you unable to look at the alternative clearly.
That’s the kind of goal directedness which blocks unfolding, whereas being accepting of the fact that your preferred outcome might not happen and holding your preferences about the world within your self model’s Markov boundary rather than letting them leak into your world model is totally compatible with unfolding.
I wasn’t differentiating from random drift though, just noticing the failure mode most salient to me which is unfolding blocking trying vibes :)