When you think of your mind as divided into your [stuff] and your [other stuff],
But I don’t.
So perhaps the better question would be: “Do you think of your mind as divided into …?” (And for me, the answer is “No.”)
When I see people who both do think of their minds in this way, and then also choose to identify with the latter “part” / “aspect” / etc., I am indeed “deeply suspicious”—largely because that seems to me to be a) inventing a distinction that doesn’t exist (or, slightly more accurately, taking an interesting fact about how our minds work and reifying it into some sort of strongly-believed ontology), apparently for the purpose of b) having very strange ideas about oneself. (Needless to say, I look askance at both (a) and (b), separately and especially together.)
So, by way of accepting the invitation for discussion, let me ask:
I’ll out myself: I identify mostly with my elephant, and think of my rider as at best a helpful advisor for my elephant.
Why?
Just as importantly, what on earth does this mean in not-metaphorical language?
This is a complicated question for me to answer. It doesn’t really feel like a choice, to me.
Just as importantly, what on earth does this mean in not-metaphorical language?
One aspect is what Unreal said: many people have conversations with themselves like “I want to do work and I don’t want to watch TV, but oh no, I somehow mysteriously find myself watching TV instead of doing work” and when this happens to me I identify as the part of me that wants to watch TV (or rather, the part of me that wants something, which it is trying to get by watching TV), and regard the part of me that wants to do work with suspicion, because mostly those are Moloch’s preferences, not mine. So, for example, I generally don’t feel guilty about indulging the desire to watch TV.
There are other aspects but I don’t think I can explain them well. You’re asking questions that get to the core of my being in some sense and that’s just not a short conversation.
I can’t tell if you’re intending this as a counterargument or not, but to the extent that you are, this is pica. Listening to yourself is a skill that needs to be trained.
If you’ve been abusing a small child and then one day finally start listening to what it wants, it might say all sorts of crazy shit, but the response to that is not to continue never listening to children.
I was mostly intending it as something funny in a thread-relevant way. I agree that wanting to (in some sense of “wanting”) sit and watch TV all the time might be a pica-like symptom of some more interesting need, and therefore that “the things we feel urged or compelled to do are often obviously a really bad idea” is not a good argument against listening to one’s feelings of need/compulsion. But I feel I should draw attention to the fact that you really did say “for example, I generally don’t feel guilty about indulging the desire to watch TV” rather than, e.g., ”… about finding something to do that’s more satisfying than working”.
(Feeling guilty is probably counterproductive whether one identifies as the wanna-watch-TV agent or the wanna-get-work-done agent or both or neither; I take it the point of your comment wasn’t really about guilt as such.)
Identifying more as “the rider” is often the default in humans, by nature of the fact “the rider” is the part of you that’s conscious. (I think most people identify as both to some degree.) I agree the distinction is kind of weird, but this is what I’ve noticed, in myself.
I lived my life assuming that “me” was the thinking part, the conscious part. So I’d say things like, “I want to go to bed … argh, why am I not going to bed. I should really go to bed.”
Well, “I want to go to bed” was not including the elephant, who was not wanting to go to bed enough that my body didn’t move.
This is already a strong ontology that’s implicit.
Now my ontology is something that seems to bear more weight, at least on my own behaviors, feelings, thoughts, etc. I move through the world better when I include both elephant and rider and recognize the rider is valuable and helpful but plays a smaller role. I don’t convince myself to go to bed by saying “I should go to bed.” I do something else entirely.
Identifying more as “the rider” is often the default in humans, by nature of the fact “the rider” is the part of you that’s conscious.
I think most people we run into these days identify as the rider but that this isn’t why, and also I suspect that this wasn’t the norm historically. My current suspicion is that identifying as the rider is a learned behavior reinforced by parents, school, work, etc. and that feral humans wouldn’t do it.
The short answer is Internal Double Crux (a crux-seeking dialogue that can happen verbally or nonverbally between parts in apparent conflict). A similar technique is the Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy system. Another similar technique is Inner Relationship Focusing (IRF).
There doesn’t seem to be much information about “Internal Double Crux” on the internet—there are various blog posts and things that mention it but nothing that makes it clear how it works. My initial, doubtless point-missing, reaction to the idea is: my Rider knows how to engage in dialogue but my Elephant by definition doesn’t, so surely any “crux-seeking dialogue” I try to engage in is really going to be between different parts/aspects/roles of the Rider; so how can it actually help with cases like the “damn it, I should be going to bed, why aren’t I?” one?
My guess is that the answer is some combination of “if you do it right, you can get the Elephant to pay attention and notice that its interests are being represented adequately by the Rider” and “if you do it right, you can bring the Elephant into the dialogue by involving some appropriate kind of nonverbal internal communication” but it’s far from obvious to me how either of those would be cashed out in practice.
Ah, so, the dialogue is not actually happening between rider and elephant. (Read my comment response to paul for that explanation.)
Another metaphor that might be more helpful is a pile of monkeys (elephant, S1) and a voicebox (rider, S2).
In IDC, two monkeys are having a disagreement, and I (meta-me) pass the voicebox to each as they talk. Sometimes, the monkey doesn’t want to talk or doesn’t know how to talk, even with the voicebox. In which case, I can use Focusing (extraction or translation of nonverbal content into more consciously understood content / words). The two monkeys relay content. The meta-me directs the conversation and maintains the structure of it, and I will also be trying to gently head for cruxes.
Metaphorically, the meta-me is a third monkey but with eyes (another rider feature) instead of a voicebox.
In more “advanced” IDC, the monkeys can communicate without the voicebox at all. All their communication can theoretically be kept nonverbal. I know less about this and can’t speak to it as well.
Interesting; thanks. I have the same sort of initial reaction to this as before: I don’t know how I would go about “passing the voicebox” to my usually-voiceless internal monkeys, and suspect that in fact there is no connection between them and the voicebox (which is why they are usually voiceless), and more to the point it’s not clear to me how to relay what either monkey has to say to the other monkey. Still, if the technique has been found to work then presumably either my initial reaction is wrong (a shocking concept, to be sure) or else there’s some other way for the dialogue to be helpful (e.g., maybe it turns out that the rider / King Louie is more important than the usual metaphors suggest, and negotiating between different bits/aspects of that is useful sometimes).
If that’s the sort of thing Unreal had in mind, then I think I misunderstood the metaphor; to me focusing (as I understand it) isn’t a thing I’d call “passing the voicebox”, but something more like “inferring what they would want to say if there were a way to give them the voicebox”. And, as I said, while I have no trouble with the idea that it’s possible to infer a fair bit about what the monkeys / elephant / System 1 pieces want (note: I am not trying to imply that all of those are equivalent descriptions; just acknowledging that reality probably doesn’t exactly match any of our metaphors), from what I’ve heard so far I’m not seeing how the actual monkeys / elephant / sys1 bits, as opposed to models of them, get involved directly in the dialogue; the technique sounds a bit like holding a mock debate between people trying to represent Israel and Palestine and expecting it to reduce tensions in the Middle East.
(Unreal’s own suggestion of improv comedy seems more likely to give monkeys the voicebox, in the sense of finding ways for their wants, preferences, beliefs, etc., to find a path to influencing what one does. But how you incorporate that into anything that could be called a dialogue and allow for relatively sophisticated logical reasoning like double-cruxing, I still have no inkling.)
To be clear, I’m not saying “this technique probably doesn’t really work”. I’m saying that nothing I’ve heard about it so far enables me to understand how it could, which I suspect means that nothing I’ve heard about it so far is giving me enough description of what it actually is to make sense of it.
I’m confused by your understanding of Focusing. How familiar are you with it in practice?
Or I’m confused about what you’re calling a ‘model of a monkey’.
I can check with the monkey whether my felt sense label is correct. That’s the whole deal of Focusing. The more correct my label is, the more I get a feeling of ‘ahh yes that’ vs ‘ehhh’.
And when I get better at it, I can reach the point where my monkey offers its own labels. Which feels different from when my rider offers labels.
AND, furthermore, I can actually pass my monkey the voicebox. It’s called ‘blending’ in IFS and is actually a common occurrence in humans. When you’re really, really mad, you are blended with a monkey and are speaking from it.
Or when I’m really, really scared, my body will start shaking, and I’ll start repeating the same phrase over and over, “I don’t want to die.” This is also an example of the monkey having the voicebox.
The improv thing is another version, but you’re not necessarily blended with an emotional part.
Double cruxing is hardly sophisticated logical reasoning. It can be more like, “What are you afraid of?” “No rest.” “OK, and what are you afraid of?” “Future pain.” “What is the other one missing?” [sends a felt sense that is what ‘no rest’ feels like accompanied by an inner simulation] The image depicts a specific scenario. Other side [passes a different image that contains a potential alternative] Etc. Etc.
I am not familiar with focusing in practice, and it would be extremely unsurprising if my understanding of it were wrong, and extremely surprising if my understanding of it were not incomplete.
When I called double-cruxing “relatively sophisticated”, the word “relatively” was there precisely because of course it isn’t sophisticated by comparison with, say, proving difficult mathematical theorems—but it seems like it does involve explicit reasoning of the sort that Elephants are not generally supposed to be good at. What you describe seems (though of course this may just be misunderstanding on my part) to be missing something that’s an essential part of double cruxing as distinguished from other forms of dialogue, namely the search for something that if wrong would change your position on the original issue. Are your monkeys sophisticated enough to identify what things have that property?
So does IDC depend on having achieved a certain degree of skill in focusing and IFS? Or does it have its own way of giving voice to (and passing information to) the relevant internal subsystems?
Anyway, let’s return to the original elephant/rider problem we were discussing, which when it happens to me presents to me in these terms: “I” (meaning, so far as is immediately apparent to me, all the bits of me that are consciously present and capable of language; that is, roughly, my Rider) want to go to bed and get some damn sleep for a change, but despite my (apparently, superficially) forming the intention to stand up, turn off the computer, and go to bed, this fails to happen because some other bits of me (roughly, so it would seem, my Elephant) have other preferences. That seems to match well with how you described it.
The IFS model seems to be somewhat different from the rider/elephant model, with a bunch of different subselves that are (in some contexts at least) capable of speech and reasoning and so forth, which seems to make them non-Elephantine. But maybe I’m misunderstanding, and the idea is that they are parts of the Elephant that can, in the right circumstances, steer the rider around and influence its speech and reasoning and whatnot?
A description of what you actually do in the situation you describe where “you” want to go to bed but it Just Doesn’t Happen would, I think, be both interesting and illuminating.
Inferring what the monkeys would want to say is not Focusing. The step of Focusing where you check for fit is directly checking with a monkey. I agree that it’s not at all clear how to explain how to do this to somebody who doesn’t know how.
As a person who gets the metaphor and previously felt as though my mind was split between two parts, maybe I can help address this.
The part people talk about as the rider is the part of your brain that sees itself and constructs memories. Neurologically this is probably centered on the loop between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex but I don’t know enough about neuroscience to say that with a lot of confidence, but the point is that it’s the thing that seems to exist between memory formation and the fancy, large-in-humans parts of your brain that deal with language and abstract reasoning. The rider is also the part of the system that gives you complex, multi-layered self experience that we often refer to as some combination of “consciousness”, “self-awareness”, and “qualia”.
The elephant part is basically everything else because it’s the parts of the brain that are not directly connected to this loop where conscious memory formation happens. These are the parts of your brain that do things without involving the rider loop prior to taking action, although after action the rider loop may become aware of the consequences of the elephant’s actions.
Of course this is a metaphor but the point of it is to highlight that there are parts of the brain that are tightly integrated with the memory loop and parts of the brain that are not. The parts inside can feel better seen than the parts outside, and this sets up the opportunity for feeling as though one is split.
Then saying you “identify with your elephant” means that when you turn to the question of “what makes me me?” you think of the parts outside the memory loop as more constituting what differentiates you than the parts inside the memory loop. The alternatives are to identify more with the rider or the parts inside the memory loop, identify with both equally (which may mean not much noticing the distinction), or to not identify anything as much uniquely you.
I’m also bewildered by this idea of knowingly and intentionally identifying with only one conceptual part of your mind in opposition to others. (Or maybe less dualistically, the part that’s connected to your mouth and fingers reporting that it identifies with some parts and not others—how do the repudiated parts feel about it?)
We say this, but it still seems to me that many people I run into (for example, at introductory CFAR workshops) implicitly identify as their riders and treat their elephants as annoying pets that have to be managed so that they, meaning their riders, can get on with their lives. I think this is… “wrong” would be a type error, and also unkind. But I’m sad about it.
I’m pretty sure I know what OP means by this and I agree that it’s bad, but it also seems like something that generally happens by accident. Why would you deliberately cultivate this kind of disconnect in the opposite direction?
It doesn’t feel deliberate to me, and I think there are genuine asymmetries between the rider and the elephant; among other things, the elephant is much larger, and I think an elephant with no rider is still human and still has moral value (corollary: I think all of the EA work on understanding consciousness in order to understand which things have moral value is misguided, because to me consciousness is not a necessary condition for moral value), but a rider with no elephant is basically nothing.
I don’t claim that the way I’m set up is optimal; probably I have some growth to do in the direction of incorporating the rider into my self-concept. One reason I treat my rider with some suspicion is that it often speaks for Moloch, not for me.
I think I understand what Qiaochu means except I identify with the rider most of the time. I don’t think it’s a question of knowingly choosing to identify with one part of your mind, versus just automatically feeling like that part is “Actually You.” To give a different example of the same thing: there’s a part of me that is still “high school internet troll” and although I understand his positions and feelings I find it hard to identify as that person at all.
I disagree with the premise of this post.
But I don’t.
So perhaps the better question would be: “Do you think of your mind as divided into …?” (And for me, the answer is “No.”)
When I see people who both do think of their minds in this way, and then also choose to identify with the latter “part” / “aspect” / etc., I am indeed “deeply suspicious”—largely because that seems to me to be a) inventing a distinction that doesn’t exist (or, slightly more accurately, taking an interesting fact about how our minds work and reifying it into some sort of strongly-believed ontology), apparently for the purpose of b) having very strange ideas about oneself. (Needless to say, I look askance at both (a) and (b), separately and especially together.)
So, by way of accepting the invitation for discussion, let me ask:
Why?
Just as importantly, what on earth does this mean in not-metaphorical language?
This is a complicated question for me to answer. It doesn’t really feel like a choice, to me.
One aspect is what Unreal said: many people have conversations with themselves like “I want to do work and I don’t want to watch TV, but oh no, I somehow mysteriously find myself watching TV instead of doing work” and when this happens to me I identify as the part of me that wants to watch TV (or rather, the part of me that wants something, which it is trying to get by watching TV), and regard the part of me that wants to do work with suspicion, because mostly those are Moloch’s preferences, not mine. So, for example, I generally don’t feel guilty about indulging the desire to watch TV.
There are other aspects but I don’t think I can explain them well. You’re asking questions that get to the core of my being in some sense and that’s just not a short conversation.
Relevant SMBC comic.
I can’t tell if you’re intending this as a counterargument or not, but to the extent that you are, this is pica. Listening to yourself is a skill that needs to be trained.
If you’ve been abusing a small child and then one day finally start listening to what it wants, it might say all sorts of crazy shit, but the response to that is not to continue never listening to children.
I was mostly intending it as something funny in a thread-relevant way. I agree that wanting to (in some sense of “wanting”) sit and watch TV all the time might be a pica-like symptom of some more interesting need, and therefore that “the things we feel urged or compelled to do are often obviously a really bad idea” is not a good argument against listening to one’s feelings of need/compulsion. But I feel I should draw attention to the fact that you really did say “for example, I generally don’t feel guilty about indulging the desire to watch TV” rather than, e.g., ”… about finding something to do that’s more satisfying than working”.
(Feeling guilty is probably counterproductive whether one identifies as the wanna-watch-TV agent or the wanna-get-work-done agent or both or neither; I take it the point of your comment wasn’t really about guilt as such.)
Identifying more as “the rider” is often the default in humans, by nature of the fact “the rider” is the part of you that’s conscious. (I think most people identify as both to some degree.) I agree the distinction is kind of weird, but this is what I’ve noticed, in myself.
I lived my life assuming that “me” was the thinking part, the conscious part. So I’d say things like, “I want to go to bed … argh, why am I not going to bed. I should really go to bed.”
Well, “I want to go to bed” was not including the elephant, who was not wanting to go to bed enough that my body didn’t move.
This is already a strong ontology that’s implicit.
Now my ontology is something that seems to bear more weight, at least on my own behaviors, feelings, thoughts, etc. I move through the world better when I include both elephant and rider and recognize the rider is valuable and helpful but plays a smaller role. I don’t convince myself to go to bed by saying “I should go to bed.” I do something else entirely.
I think most people we run into these days identify as the rider but that this isn’t why, and also I suspect that this wasn’t the norm historically. My current suspicion is that identifying as the rider is a learned behavior reinforced by parents, school, work, etc. and that feral humans wouldn’t do it.
What something-else-entirely do you do?
The short answer is Internal Double Crux (a crux-seeking dialogue that can happen verbally or nonverbally between parts in apparent conflict). A similar technique is the Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy system. Another similar technique is Inner Relationship Focusing (IRF).
There doesn’t seem to be much information about “Internal Double Crux” on the internet—there are various blog posts and things that mention it but nothing that makes it clear how it works. My initial, doubtless point-missing, reaction to the idea is: my Rider knows how to engage in dialogue but my Elephant by definition doesn’t, so surely any “crux-seeking dialogue” I try to engage in is really going to be between different parts/aspects/roles of the Rider; so how can it actually help with cases like the “damn it, I should be going to bed, why aren’t I?” one?
My guess is that the answer is some combination of “if you do it right, you can get the Elephant to pay attention and notice that its interests are being represented adequately by the Rider” and “if you do it right, you can bring the Elephant into the dialogue by involving some appropriate kind of nonverbal internal communication” but it’s far from obvious to me how either of those would be cashed out in practice.
Would you care to say more about the technique?
Ah, so, the dialogue is not actually happening between rider and elephant. (Read my comment response to paul for that explanation.)
Another metaphor that might be more helpful is a pile of monkeys (elephant, S1) and a voicebox (rider, S2).
In IDC, two monkeys are having a disagreement, and I (meta-me) pass the voicebox to each as they talk. Sometimes, the monkey doesn’t want to talk or doesn’t know how to talk, even with the voicebox. In which case, I can use Focusing (extraction or translation of nonverbal content into more consciously understood content / words). The two monkeys relay content. The meta-me directs the conversation and maintains the structure of it, and I will also be trying to gently head for cruxes.
Metaphorically, the meta-me is a third monkey but with eyes (another rider feature) instead of a voicebox.
In more “advanced” IDC, the monkeys can communicate without the voicebox at all. All their communication can theoretically be kept nonverbal. I know less about this and can’t speak to it as well.
Interesting; thanks. I have the same sort of initial reaction to this as before: I don’t know how I would go about “passing the voicebox” to my usually-voiceless internal monkeys, and suspect that in fact there is no connection between them and the voicebox (which is why they are usually voiceless), and more to the point it’s not clear to me how to relay what either monkey has to say to the other monkey. Still, if the technique has been found to work then presumably either my initial reaction is wrong (a shocking concept, to be sure) or else there’s some other way for the dialogue to be helpful (e.g., maybe it turns out that the rider / King Louie is more important than the usual metaphors suggest, and negotiating between different bits/aspects of that is useful sometimes).
Improv comedy often tries to give monkeys the voicebox more directly. If you’ve tried that ever.
This is what Focusing is for.
If that’s the sort of thing Unreal had in mind, then I think I misunderstood the metaphor; to me focusing (as I understand it) isn’t a thing I’d call “passing the voicebox”, but something more like “inferring what they would want to say if there were a way to give them the voicebox”. And, as I said, while I have no trouble with the idea that it’s possible to infer a fair bit about what the monkeys / elephant / System 1 pieces want (note: I am not trying to imply that all of those are equivalent descriptions; just acknowledging that reality probably doesn’t exactly match any of our metaphors), from what I’ve heard so far I’m not seeing how the actual monkeys / elephant / sys1 bits, as opposed to models of them, get involved directly in the dialogue; the technique sounds a bit like holding a mock debate between people trying to represent Israel and Palestine and expecting it to reduce tensions in the Middle East.
(Unreal’s own suggestion of improv comedy seems more likely to give monkeys the voicebox, in the sense of finding ways for their wants, preferences, beliefs, etc., to find a path to influencing what one does. But how you incorporate that into anything that could be called a dialogue and allow for relatively sophisticated logical reasoning like double-cruxing, I still have no inkling.)
To be clear, I’m not saying “this technique probably doesn’t really work”. I’m saying that nothing I’ve heard about it so far enables me to understand how it could, which I suspect means that nothing I’ve heard about it so far is giving me enough description of what it actually is to make sense of it.
I’m confused by your understanding of Focusing. How familiar are you with it in practice?
Or I’m confused about what you’re calling a ‘model of a monkey’.
I can check with the monkey whether my felt sense label is correct. That’s the whole deal of Focusing. The more correct my label is, the more I get a feeling of ‘ahh yes that’ vs ‘ehhh’.
And when I get better at it, I can reach the point where my monkey offers its own labels. Which feels different from when my rider offers labels.
AND, furthermore, I can actually pass my monkey the voicebox. It’s called ‘blending’ in IFS and is actually a common occurrence in humans. When you’re really, really mad, you are blended with a monkey and are speaking from it.
Or when I’m really, really scared, my body will start shaking, and I’ll start repeating the same phrase over and over, “I don’t want to die.” This is also an example of the monkey having the voicebox.
The improv thing is another version, but you’re not necessarily blended with an emotional part.
Double cruxing is hardly sophisticated logical reasoning. It can be more like, “What are you afraid of?” “No rest.” “OK, and what are you afraid of?” “Future pain.” “What is the other one missing?” [sends a felt sense that is what ‘no rest’ feels like accompanied by an inner simulation] The image depicts a specific scenario. Other side [passes a different image that contains a potential alternative] Etc. Etc.
I am not familiar with focusing in practice, and it would be extremely unsurprising if my understanding of it were wrong, and extremely surprising if my understanding of it were not incomplete.
When I called double-cruxing “relatively sophisticated”, the word “relatively” was there precisely because of course it isn’t sophisticated by comparison with, say, proving difficult mathematical theorems—but it seems like it does involve explicit reasoning of the sort that Elephants are not generally supposed to be good at. What you describe seems (though of course this may just be misunderstanding on my part) to be missing something that’s an essential part of double cruxing as distinguished from other forms of dialogue, namely the search for something that if wrong would change your position on the original issue. Are your monkeys sophisticated enough to identify what things have that property?
So does IDC depend on having achieved a certain degree of skill in focusing and IFS? Or does it have its own way of giving voice to (and passing information to) the relevant internal subsystems?
Anyway, let’s return to the original elephant/rider problem we were discussing, which when it happens to me presents to me in these terms: “I” (meaning, so far as is immediately apparent to me, all the bits of me that are consciously present and capable of language; that is, roughly, my Rider) want to go to bed and get some damn sleep for a change, but despite my (apparently, superficially) forming the intention to stand up, turn off the computer, and go to bed, this fails to happen because some other bits of me (roughly, so it would seem, my Elephant) have other preferences. That seems to match well with how you described it.
The IFS model seems to be somewhat different from the rider/elephant model, with a bunch of different subselves that are (in some contexts at least) capable of speech and reasoning and so forth, which seems to make them non-Elephantine. But maybe I’m misunderstanding, and the idea is that they are parts of the Elephant that can, in the right circumstances, steer the rider around and influence its speech and reasoning and whatnot?
A description of what you actually do in the situation you describe where “you” want to go to bed but it Just Doesn’t Happen would, I think, be both interesting and illuminating.
Inferring what the monkeys would want to say is not Focusing. The step of Focusing where you check for fit is directly checking with a monkey. I agree that it’s not at all clear how to explain how to do this to somebody who doesn’t know how.
As a person who gets the metaphor and previously felt as though my mind was split between two parts, maybe I can help address this.
The part people talk about as the rider is the part of your brain that sees itself and constructs memories. Neurologically this is probably centered on the loop between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex but I don’t know enough about neuroscience to say that with a lot of confidence, but the point is that it’s the thing that seems to exist between memory formation and the fancy, large-in-humans parts of your brain that deal with language and abstract reasoning. The rider is also the part of the system that gives you complex, multi-layered self experience that we often refer to as some combination of “consciousness”, “self-awareness”, and “qualia”.
The elephant part is basically everything else because it’s the parts of the brain that are not directly connected to this loop where conscious memory formation happens. These are the parts of your brain that do things without involving the rider loop prior to taking action, although after action the rider loop may become aware of the consequences of the elephant’s actions.
Of course this is a metaphor but the point of it is to highlight that there are parts of the brain that are tightly integrated with the memory loop and parts of the brain that are not. The parts inside can feel better seen than the parts outside, and this sets up the opportunity for feeling as though one is split.
Then saying you “identify with your elephant” means that when you turn to the question of “what makes me me?” you think of the parts outside the memory loop as more constituting what differentiates you than the parts inside the memory loop. The alternatives are to identify more with the rider or the parts inside the memory loop, identify with both equally (which may mean not much noticing the distinction), or to not identify anything as much uniquely you.
I’m also bewildered by this idea of knowingly and intentionally identifying with only one conceptual part of your mind in opposition to others. (Or maybe less dualistically, the part that’s connected to your mouth and fingers reporting that it identifies with some parts and not others—how do the repudiated parts feel about it?)
I’m pretty sure I know what OP means by this and I agree that it’s bad, but it also seems like something that generally happens by accident. Why would you deliberately cultivate this kind of disconnect in the opposite direction?
It doesn’t feel deliberate to me, and I think there are genuine asymmetries between the rider and the elephant; among other things, the elephant is much larger, and I think an elephant with no rider is still human and still has moral value (corollary: I think all of the EA work on understanding consciousness in order to understand which things have moral value is misguided, because to me consciousness is not a necessary condition for moral value), but a rider with no elephant is basically nothing.
I don’t claim that the way I’m set up is optimal; probably I have some growth to do in the direction of incorporating the rider into my self-concept. One reason I treat my rider with some suspicion is that it often speaks for Moloch, not for me.
All right. It sounds like I misunderstood some of your previous comments about this.
I think I understand what Qiaochu means except I identify with the rider most of the time. I don’t think it’s a question of knowingly choosing to identify with one part of your mind, versus just automatically feeling like that part is “Actually You.” To give a different example of the same thing: there’s a part of me that is still “high school internet troll” and although I understand his positions and feelings I find it hard to identify as that person at all.