I recently came up with a particular way of thinking about my mind: there are many relatively independent subsystems in my mind that
are particular quirks in human cognition that I can take advantage of, and
always watch and react to observations and sometimes my own thoughts; I usually can’t hide from them
For example, here are some of mine, with made-up names:
the “Magic Brain Juice” one, which automates any repetitive enough trigger-action pairs
the “naive RL learner” one, which reinforces rewarding experiences and stuff
the “associative thinking” one, which makes random associations of various concepts in my mind whenever I’m not focusedly thinking about something, and notifies my consciousness when it finds something novel
the “competence-identity” one, which tries to maintain (the appearance of) my competence, and emotionally fuels me whenever it doesn’t match that
the “emotional validation” one, which craves social attention
… and so on and so forth
I expect this framing to generalize to some extent to other people, and I also expect it to matter even more to rationalists, because some rats do a kind of renovation in their mind, and in the process ignore these “subsystems”
Inspirations:
Kaj Sotala’s IFS (which helps me think about “subsystems” generally)
“We are agents who cannot simply act because every action is accompanied by self-modification.”—Magic Brain Juice
… which motivates “some subsystems are always in my mind observing me doing stuff”
I recently came up with a particular way of thinking about my mind: there are many relatively independent subsystems in my mind that
are particular quirks in human cognition that I can take advantage of, and
always watch and react to observations and sometimes my own thoughts; I usually can’t hide from them
For example, here are some of mine, with made-up names:
the “Magic Brain Juice” one, which automates any repetitive enough trigger-action pairs
the “naive RL learner” one, which reinforces rewarding experiences and stuff
the “associative thinking” one, which makes random associations of various concepts in my mind whenever I’m not focusedly thinking about something, and notifies my consciousness when it finds something novel
the “competence-identity” one, which tries to maintain (the appearance of) my competence, and emotionally fuels me whenever it doesn’t match that
the “emotional validation” one, which craves social attention
… and so on and so forth
I expect this framing to generalize to some extent to other people, and I also expect it to matter even more to rationalists, because some rats do a kind of renovation in their mind, and in the process ignore these “subsystems”
Inspirations:
Kaj Sotala’s IFS (which helps me think about “subsystems” generally)
“We are agents who cannot simply act because every action is accompanied by self-modification.”—Magic Brain Juice
… which motivates “some subsystems are always in my mind observing me doing stuff”
Autopilot Thinking